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.
"SRM's best feature is automation."
"The solution is consistent."
"The UI is very user-friendly and testing is easy."
"The product functionality is fairly high-quality."
"In terms of recovery, if you have a test job script, you can put it on top of it. You can create custom steps so that it will be more granular. It will be an easy, one click solution when it comes to the recovery application."
"The solution is strong when it comes to protection and analytics, with the latter being added later on."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with our Nutanix environment."
"It reduced the time for DR tests from the infrastructure side. Being able to get our work done in a matter of a couple of minutes so the app teams can get to work and can do their testing has been significant."
"The ease of use and simplicity in moving things without having to do a cross-v set of V-motions has been most valuable. It saves time and effort and it eliminates mistakes."
"The replication and recovery features are the most valuable... On two occasions, other departments in our organization reported issues with specific virtual machines. We used the checkpoint feature of the Zerto to enable the recovery of those machines to a point that was a few minutes prior to the problem."
"It works very well in terms of it providing continuous data protection. It does what it says it is going to do. We have been using it for several years, and once or twice, we had to recover a machine or files. It didn't have any problems in doing what it is supposed to be doing."
"Failover using Zerto is simply a one-button click, and it does everything else in restoring the VMs at a different datacenter (recovery site)."
"The RTO and RPO are unparalleled. In the event you do have an issue, you can be back up and running (depending on the size of your infrastructure) within minutes. Your RTO can be 15 minutes and data loss be five minutes. I don't think that's matched by anybody else in the field."
"The most valuable features are the single pane of glass and the reduction in time it takes for our systems engineering team to manage the platform."
"Zerto is intuitive. We could set everything up in the environment within a day and a half and start migrating on the third day."
"We've had configuration issues on occasion. We start to fail over, and then we have to call it off because the configuration is not right, or the data stores aren't configured correctly in the secondary data center. Oftentimes, it is just the experience level of the team, and we have to bring in the vendor to help and validate our configuration."
"You need a lot of knowledge to work with the interface because it is not really easy to use, and it would be great if the dashboard were simplified."
"In my opinion, the integration with Peer Persistent Storage could be improved."
"SRM may hit some OS issues related to IP changes, but they are usually OS related, especially in the 2008 realm."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"The back sites sometimes are very, very complicated."
"Lacks stability and as a result requires continuous monitoring."
"The solution must provide better integration with third-party vendors."
"They had a bug recently that has come up and caused some issues. They currently have a bug in their production versions that prevents their product from functioning in some scenarios, and we have hit a few of those scenarios."
"Another area for improvement I'd like to see is the tuning of the VRAs built into the GUI. It's a little cryptic. You really have to be a very technical engineer to get that deep into it. I'd like to see a little better interface that allows you to do that tuning yourself, rather than trying to get their engineer and your engineer together to do it."
"This solution could be improved if it met all the requirements that we look for including supporting multiple operating systems. We would prefer to use one solution for DR and backup."
"Zerto could be considered as a backup product but this is not true. So if we could consolidate and use Zerto for disaster recovery as well as everyday backup and restore for situations where we need to recover something, that would be helpful. Anyway, we think that Zerto will win with no competition in the Disaster Recovery process, so we stay focused on this. Now we are testing version 10 which include real-time ransomware detection, a new Cyber Resilience Vault and enhanced cloud capabilities and security: we expect more from these features for superior hybrid cloud security."
"Zerto added the backup feature, but it's not quite up to speed yet when you compare it with the backup capabilities of other solutions out there."
"Overall, Zerto is doing a very good job. We have experienced a few downtimes on networking. Most of the time, they come up with a solution immediately to sort out any challenge that may affect data flow or data migration. It does not happen frequently. We might experience it once in two months, but when we face any downtime, it does not impact the data."
"It is difficult to manage failing over between sites if you are at the site that was impacted."
"More user support would be best for me because I'm not in the product all the time. So, having strong support is probably the most important decision on any products that we buy."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 27 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 127 reviews. VMware SRM is rated 8.0, while Zerto is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of VMware SRM writes "Robust reliability tool ensuring high availability and disaster recovery for virtualized environments". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zerto writes "Our average recovery time is now in seconds, and we can spin up a test version without affecting our production environment". 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.
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