We performed a comparison between VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) and Zerto based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Zerto wins out in this competition. Its consistent sub-second response for RTO and RPO makes it one of the most responsive and fastest in the marketplace today. Users are able to easily run tests and change scenarios without any effect on an organization's production.
"The product is evolving and the vendor is committed to change."
"Virtual Machine Recovery during DR situation, with automation and easy to use menus and options."
"It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"The replication is a key feature."
"It is a very stable solution...I was involved in VMware SRM's deployment phase two years ago, and it was an easy process."
"The solution runs well in the background, just in case we need it."
"The solution is strong when it comes to protection and analytics, with the latter being added later on."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can independently run the disaster recovery without disturbing the production instances."
"The most valuable feature is Zerto's ability to precopy data to a remote destination prior to the actual live migration period. That saves us a lot of time and has been very helpful. For example, if we had migrations occurring in waves over a period of several weeks with a VPG or VPG setup of approximately 50 VMs, that is multiple gigabytes of data, even terabytes in many cases. Having that data already copied on the evening of the migration saves considerable hours of time. It easily saves us four to six hours a night."
"The mobile application is very useful as a real-time monitoring, reporting tool. When asked the status of our machine backup and recovery ability, an easy answer is to display the status on the real-time application or browser. The Zerto Analytics tool helps predict future storage needs by tracking trends in space, journal size, and I/O rate. These are reportable statistics making quantifiable tracking easy and accurate. Having a web interface simplifies access by other system administrators."
"Zerto's user-friendliness is valuable."
"It does what it's purported to do, which is to provide continuous data protection. We have a five-second RPO. It's definitely doing its job."
"Zerto provides our customers with the ability to continue work, even if something happens to their office or data center."
"Zerto is extremely easy to use. You set it and forget it."
"The file restoration is very helpful. They've improved it over the years to make it a lot more user-friendly and easy to do, which I appreciate. So, we use that quite a bit. The failover process is quite simple and intuitive. Even the configuration and setup are pretty easy to do. It is pretty easy to use. I've done the restoration of servers several times, not as a disaster. When an upgrade on a server goes wrong and it messes things up, I can just fail back to a previous version and try it again. So, that has been really helpful."
"I prefer Zerto because it's a little more automated. VMware has more requirements... It's a little more click-and-go versus click-and-monitor..."
"One thing which is lacking from the SRM is reporting."
"In general, the drawbacks of VMware SRM, where improvements can be made, stem from the fact that it is an expensive and complex product."
"SRM may hit some OS issues related to IP changes, but they are usually OS related, especially in the 2008 realm."
"The solution must provide better integration with third-party vendors."
"The solution could improve by removing some of the limitations we have been facing. There could be better integrated."
"VMware SRM needs to improve its pricing."
"Cost is definitely an area where the product could be improved."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"The alerting could be fine tuned and improved. It does a lot of alerts, but it's a little bit cumbersome to modify them."
"I don't have any input for improvement or a critical feature request at this moment. If anything, a lower price is always better."
"The number-one area in which they need to improve their product is what I would call "automatic self-healing." This is related to running them at scale... We have 1,000 VRAs and if any one of their VRAs has a problem, goes offline, all of the customer protection groups and all of the customers that are tied to that VRA are not replicating at all. That means the RPO is slipping until somebody makes a manual effort to fix the issue. It has become a full-time job at my company for somebody to keep Zerto running all the time, everywhere, and to keep all the customers up and going."
"I want to have an OVF or some local deployment where I can deploy the ZVRA rather than having to push it from the console. Some of our smaller remote sites have relatively poor bandwidth, and they can't keep up with the constant deployment stream from our center console, meaning we have to find some creative hours to get around the bandwidth bottlenecks. If I could push out a small install file, install it locally, and then reach back to the console, that would be excellent."
"I would like to request better reporting in Zerto. I can see the data that I need in the console, but if I need to put the data or the history into a report, it is difficult. It is something that auditors might require, so reporting is something that needs to be improved."
"If there is a mass of changes to a server, Zerto will restart the replication. It would be nice to know why that happens."
"I wish they would...develop their PowerShell module to be more robust. So instead of having to rely on the API to actually include a PowerShell command, it would let you create VPGs, delete VPGs, modify VPGs, etc. This would ease the automation effort of deployment and decommissioning and I'd really appreciate that."
"I would like to see a couple of details regarding awareness of VM events coming outside of ZVR."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 71 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 235 reviews. VMware SRM is rated 8.0, while Zerto is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of VMware SRM writes "A scalable solution that integrates well with the VMware platform, but its platform agnostics do not support on-cloud usage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zerto writes "Gives us business continuity capabilities during hurricane season and in case of ransomware". VMware SRM is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, Azure Site Recovery, VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service , whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Rubrik, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, Commvault Cloud and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. See our VMware SRM vs. Zerto report.
See our list of best Disaster Recovery (DR) Software vendors.
We monitor all Disaster Recovery (DR) Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.