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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Sep 1, 2022

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.

  • Ease of Deployment: Users of both solutions indicate that setup, installation, and deployment are straightforward and easy to complete.
  • Features: VMware SRM users feel it offers great virtualization, automation, and good failover. The UI is user friendly and makes testing very easy. Many users feel the solution needs to be more scalable. They say the solution can be unstable and needs to be monitored regularly. There have been scenarios where, if the configuration is off a bit, it will affect the failover process.

    Zerto users tell us they can easily and quickly create protection groups and that Zerto’s ability to maintain a sub-second RPO over a group of machines, and that the group of machines could be spread across multiple storage hardware, makes it unique in the marketplace. Zerto integrates well with many other hypervisors. Users would like to see Zerto move beyond manual failover and offer automatic failover. Users feel that Zerto has some limitations regarding deduplication, which affects their file restoration capabilities, and that documentation processes need to improve.
  • Pricing: Users of both solutions feel they are expensive.
  • Service and Support: Users of both solutions are happy with the service and support.

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.

To learn more, read our detailed VMware SRM vs. Zerto Report (Updated: March 2024).
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"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."

More VMware SRM Pros →

"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."

More Zerto Pros →

Cons
"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."

More VMware SRM Cons →

"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."

More Zerto Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Compare to hardware-based replication, I think software based replication is best and cheap."
  • "Licensing costs explode after 75 VMs."
  • "The price of this solution is on the expensive side."
  • "The cost of SRM is a little bit high, especially for smaller companies."
  • "The cost of SRM is on par with market rates."
  • "The licensing costs are increasing."
  • "It is about $3,000 a year for the 25 pack. The package gives you the ability to protect up to 25 virtual machines."
  • "There is an annual license to use this solution."
  • More VMware SRM Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Pricing depends on your future growth. Start small and then scale up."
  • "Zerto’s licensing model has changed a bit over the last year and they are in alignment with others. It is pretty simple and more economical."
  • "Licensing is based on the number of VMs to replicate. The first thing should be to get the number of VMs to replicate based on your business needs."
  • "Licensing is VM based so you can buy packages or single VM. Price is not low but the power of application is high, so you will get your money back."
  • "It's a little bit expensive."
  • "We believe the pricing, setup costs, and licensing are easy to understand. The pricing seems very reasonable."
  • "The solution is very cost-effective and very easy to set-up but does not compromise on features."
  • "While we find the twenty-five VM license somewhat inflexible, the actual setup costs are minimal as the product is so easy to install."
  • More Zerto Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The solution can be deployed in a couple of hours.
    Top Answer:I rate the product price a five to six on a scale of one to ten, where one is a very high price, and ten is a very low price.
    Top Answer:It is important to understand that Broadcom's acquisition of VMware is one of the major problems attached to the solution right now to understand what needs improvement in the product. The product's… more »
    Top Answer:Ik fluister:VM Host Oracle en DataGuard hebben we per toeval vervangen door Zerto :-) tijdens de Zerto implementatie en VPG werden de Host Data in write-ack Block-Level gerepliceerd. Qua licentie 1 =… more »
    Top Answer:Real-time replication is a valuable feature, ensuring that changes made to the production site are immediately reflected at the recovery site.
    Top Answer:Zerto's pricing doesn't depend on the number of virtual applications. Even if we have a server with 200 terabytes of data, we'll only pay for protecting that single server, not for the total size of… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    8,603
    Comparisons
    6,684
    Reviews
    25
    Average Words per Review
    402
    Rating
    8.2
    Views
    11,784
    Comparisons
    6,522
    Reviews
    122
    Average Words per Review
    928
    Rating
    9.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
    Zerto Virtual Replication
    Learn More
    Interactive Demo
    VMware
    Demo Not Available
    Overview

    VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) is a business continuity and disaster recovery solution that is part of the vSphere virtualization suite. It helps you plan, test, and run the recovery of virtual machines between a protected vCenter Server site and a recovery vCenter Server site. VMware SRM aims to minimize data loss and system downtime by letting you automate backups and orchestrate the recovery of entire VMware storage systems. VMware SRM is offered on-premises and on the AWS cloud.

    VMware SRM is most commonly used for:

    • Disaster recovery
    • Disaster avoidance
    • Data center migrations
    • Site-level load balancing
    • Maintenance testing for enterprise applications

    As a disaster recovery tool, VMware SRM:

    • Provides replication technology.
    • Supports policy-based management of backup programs.
    • Lets you run non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans.

    VMware SRM Key Features

    Some of VMware SRM’s key features include:
    Good scalability and stability, fast and reliable recovery, automated orchestration workflows, automated recovery of network and security settings, non-disruptive recovery testing, orchestrated cross-vCenter vMotion, stretched storage support, and self-service provisioning.

    VMware SRM Benefits

    The main benefits of using VMware SRM include:

    • Integration: VMware SRM integrates with other VMware technologies and architectures.

    • Non-disruptive testing: VMware SRM allows you to conduct tests during business hours without disruptions.

    • Reduced recovery time: By using automated orchestration workflows, VMware SRM helps to decrease recovery time to just minutes.

    • Automated failback: With automated failback, you can resume business operations as normal very quickly.

    • Extensibility for custom automation: With VMware SRM, you can use the Orchestrator plug-in to build custom automation workflows.

    • Automated network mappings: You can automatically map network settings across the two sites when creating a recovery plan.

    • Eliminate the need to re-configure IP addresses: With VMware SRM’s automated recovery of network and security settings, it is not necessary to e-configure IP addresses on recovered VMs via integration with NSX. Configurations are also reduced post-recovery by implementing security policies.

    • Centralized recovery plans: VMware SRM’s centralized recovery plans help you protect thousands of VM’s and also make it possible to eliminate manual runbooks.

    • Protect investments: With supported replication, VMware SRM helps protect investments and tailor RPOs.

    • Lower TCO: By using VMware SRM, you can lower your TCO and incur lower expenses for disaster recovery.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are reviews from PeerSpot users who are currently using the solution:

    PeerSpot user Eslam E., Senior Solution Architect at ICT Misr, explains his experience using the solution and says that "VMware SRM is very effective between two sites with identical twin storage, you can have synchronization between the two sites."

    A founder at a comms service provider commented on the solution's efficiency, noting, "If you want to do failover, it works without any problem."

    Reviewer Rakesh-P., who is a consultant at Ashtech Infotech (India) Pvt.Ltd., mentions why he finds VMware SRM to be a good product, commenting that “The most valuable feature is disaster recovery testing. The reports are very good.”

    Ahmed F., a consultant at Daniyals Inc, says that the solution doesn’t require a lot of resources and that "The UI is very user-friendly and testing is easy."

    Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, specializes in data protection and empowers customers to run a business by simplifying the protection, disaster recovery, and mobility of on-premises and cloud applications. Zerto uses advanced hybrid cloud IT technologies to recover and protect business-critical applications in on-premises and cloud environments, enabling them to deliver continuous service without compromising security. Zerto’s foundation is based on continual data protection (CDP) technology. Users can benefit from a single, unified, and automated recovery and data management experience across all virtualized or container-based workloads.

    Zerto's native clustering technology creates a resilient, fault-tolerant system that automates recovery of critical virtual machines while supporting software updates, new OS releases, and upgrades. With native clustering, a creation, migration, or deletion of a virtual machine is automatically replicated to all nodes in the cluster. This creates an automated failover and availability solution with the features of high-end dedicated servers running at a fraction of the cost.

    Zerto Features

    Zerto has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Continuous data security
      • Continuous replication
      • The industry's lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs
      • App and database protection and recovery on a granular level
    • Agility across hybrid and multi-cloud
      • Protection between clouds
      • Simple on-premises to cloud migration
      • User-friendly native cloud services
    • Simple to scale
      • Automation and orchestration are built-in
      • Cross-platform, multi-site analytics
      • Unified experience regardless of cloud
    • Software-based
      • Hardware, hypervisor, and cloud are all independent
      • No physical appliances
      • Future-proof

    Zerto Benefits

    • Robust disaster recovery: Continuous data protection enables recovery of entire clusters, multi-VM applications, or even a single server with the lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs. Zerto allows users to safeguard, manage, and recover all of their key digital assets, whether they’re recovering to a secondary location, the public cloud, or a managed service provider.
    • Constant backup: Instead of making backups every 12 or 24 hours, Zerto creates backups every 5-15 seconds. Zerto backup has no impact on production and eliminates the burden of micromanaging backup windows by using CDP instead of snapshots. Its backup provides immediate recovery of data, folders, or virtual machines (VMs) that are only seconds behind the original, which is a simple approach to completely avoid ransomware or erase inadvertent deletions.
    • Strong long-term retention: Send data to the cloud or a purpose-built storage appliance of your choice for months or years of retention. These long-term copies can be made from local backups or DR replicas, and they can be kept wherever is most convenient for your company. Its powerful indexing and search makes discovering and restoring data simple. For data you want to maintain but only use infrequently, use cost-effective cloud tiering to shift LTR copies from hot to cold to deep-freeze storage.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Zerto stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its disaster recovery abilities and its ease of use. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Justin C., Director of IT at Arnott Inc. writes of the solution, “If we had to deal with a ransomware event, Zerto would be one of the first things I would use, because it is going to be the fastest to restore data to a certain point. If there were a fire in our building, Zerto would be a big thing too, because we would shut down everything that's in our building… It's definitely going to be one of our prevalent DRBC layers of protection."

    Brad W., Vice President of Information Technology at a financial services firm, notes, “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.”

    Sample Customers
    Acorda Therapeutics, Columbia Sportswear, Mainfreight, Nippon Express, Sin Chew Media, Fisher & Paykel, Siam City Bank
    United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Government14%
    Comms Service Provider14%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Insurance Company12%
    Healthcare Company10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business44%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise61%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise57%
    Buyer's Guide
    VMware SRM vs. Zerto
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about VMware SRM vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    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.

    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.