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 most valuable feature of the solution is that you can independently run the disaster recovery without disturbing the production instances."
"Virtual Machine Recovery during DR situation, with automation and easy to use menus and options."
"The solution is very flexible."
"The solution runs well in the background, just in case we need it."
"In terms of resiliency, the most valuable aspect of SRM has been its effectiveness."
"I would rate the ease of setting up and configuring my recovery plan in VMware SRM, a ten out of ten, with ten being the easiest."
"The installation and initial setup are straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of VMware SRM is its integration with the VMware platform."
"The replication feature and DR functionality are most valuable. Zerto has many options when a new server is being provisioned."
"Journaling is by far the most valuable feature. We have used it several times for customers who have gotten ransomware and had to do a rollback. Having the right time period was important. Some of them had their backups encrypted. So, they didn't encrypt the Zerto machine seven days previously, and we were able to bring that back up."
"VMware VM replication over narrow WAN bandwidth."
"Zerto is fast to restore our mission-critical servers when needed."
"The most valuable feature is real-time replication, where we have the ability to recover things in near real-time."
"Zerto saved us a lot of money compared to the cost of replicating at the LUN level. It also really simplified it and gave us shorter RTOs and RPOs."
"Zerto is low maintenance, so I can set it and forget it. It has a great process and an excellent solution."
"In situations of failback or moving workloads, it saves us hours. If I were to have to move a four or five terabyte machine using something like VMware's virtual copy it has to install on the machine and copy the data over. Then it has to shut the machine down and do a final copy, which means there's a lot of downtime while it's doing the final copy."
"What I think can be improved is the data replication aspect."
"They could enhance the automation features for the product."
"If you have a failover case, you need to work on it manually. It would be helpful if this could be automated. It would simplify things."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"Timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas. When this happens, we encounter errors."
"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."
"The primary site lacks adequate equipment, such as power backup and cooling, which can lead to downtime during issues like power outages or overheating."
"VMware SRM's platform agnostics should support on-cloud usage as well."
"The post-configuration part could be improved. For example, it would be super helpful to have the ability to modify DNS. Once the migration is done, we want to do some more modifications to the endpoint."
"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."
"It needs to support more public cloud."
"We would like the LTR function to be able to retain the past 12 months."
"There should be more comprehensive cyber recovery capabilities."
"The syncing of the replication needs improvement. My experience has been that, every once in a while, when you go to do a failover, it tells you it's not syncing. Then you have to troubleshoot and figure out why it's not fully synced up."
"Some of the ability to automate selections and automate VPG creations could be better."
"The interface is the only thing that we've ever really had an issue with. It's gone through some revisions. The UI, it's not clunky, but it's not as streamlined as it could be. Some of the workflow things are not as nice as they could be."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 69 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 233 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.