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.
"If you want to do failover, it works without any problem."
"We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable."
"It's easy to use and the interface is quite simple."
"VMware SRM replicates the VM from one site to another, and it helps us orchestrate the powering of VMs and DR when the DC goes down."
"This SRM solution can improve your footprint within a data center."
"It's very reliable. The solution is stable."
"The thing I like the most about SMR is the reduced cost of management."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can independently run the disaster recovery without disturbing the production instances."
"When we use our VMware environment, sometimes the HP hardware is not compatible, and we start to lose data. I like that we can restore our whole application and public-facing system through Zerto."
"Our RPOs and RTOs are now more in line with our other critical systems."
"It works really well. It's simple to set up and works well. Moreover, disaster recovery to the cloud to our organization is very important. We actually had to use it three years ago, and it worked out well for us."
"We don't have to spend a whole lot of time worrying about DR and whether or not we are covered. Zerto just works. As it is replicating, we don't need to spend a whole lot of time with it. That is a huge benefit as far as daily management."
"We own another solution called VMware Site Recovery Manager, SRM. We have licenses for our entire environment and we still decided not to use it. That's how big the difference was in the experience that Zerto provides."
"The ability to fully test your entire environment without actually performing a failover is invaluable."
"Another advantage is the ease of use. You can click through instead of typing in the code. It's all already scripted down to the network adjustments within the VMs and the timed delays for servers that need to come up in sequence. Overall, it's a good package for us to use. We started using it in about 2018 and haven't looked back."
"We relocated all our virtual machines from Belgium to Budapest, Hungary. I am not sure how we would have done it without Zerto, because we were able to keep the data in sync. We would have needed to have a lot more expensive storage products online at the time that could have kept that replication. From what I have seen from other methods, that would have required a much higher amount of bandwidth as well, then the cost would have been extreme. The mechanisms available to us with a storage space replication would have been more labor-intensive and prone to error. It was much easier and more successful with Zerto than other ways at our disposal."
"I would like to see better integration with other storage solutions. I would hope to see that within the next two or three years."
"In my opinion, the integration with Peer Persistent Storage could be improved."
"The user experience could be more friendly."
"One thing which is lacking from the SRM is reporting."
"We have had an issue when some customers have traditional designs and sites. For example, on one another site, they are using hyper-converged, using VMware, or Nutanix. We have a problem with the synchronization between the storage for site to site. This is the main issue. We are adding some other tools to support the synchronization to allow the movement of the workload from site to site easily."
"The biggest issue for us is that this product does not have any demo for customers."
"The product's dashboard is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The version we are currently using is not the latest and greatest but it has buggy behavior in some browsers."
"The setup process is time-consuming."
"It would be nice if Zerto offered OVFs, which are custom-built VMs that you can install on your virtualized environment. At the moment, I have the Zerto sitting on two custom-built Windows servers, which creates a lot of overhead. I'm waiting for them to create an OVF file, which is a built and hardened version of their Zerto server that I can just install wherever with a couple of mouse clicks."
"Right now, if you have an error, it creates a link that takes you to a website to review information about the problem. It would be nice if Zerto could give you information within the app instead of referring you to a web application."
"Not all of the knowledge required for implementing Zerto is available in their online documentation for non-partners."
"There's one feature that SRM had that Zerto doesn't have, and it's one that we've been asking for. With the orchestration part of the failover, with our DR and our primary sites, the IP addresses are almost identical. The only difference is one octet. With SRM, we could say during a failover change. With Zerto, we keep hearing that it's coming, but we haven't received it yet. It's a feature that would be very beneficial. It would reduce the time a little bit more."
"In terms of improvement, it would be helpful if the implementation team had a better best practices guide and made sure things like the journaling are very clearly understood."
"When I have a technical question, it sometimes takes a while for tech support to respond."
"Zerto's price has room for improvement."
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.
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