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 solution helps to improve business continuity processes. Its automatic failover and failback policies have been wonderful."
"The stability of SRM has been excellent. It gets a nine-out-of-ten."
"In terms of resiliency, the most valuable aspect of SRM has been its effectiveness."
"We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the automatic recovery of the virtual machine if it goes down."
"VMware SRM is a very nice tool for disaster recovery for virtual environments."
"The replication is the solution's most valuable feature. If we have some issues on the VM in the main site we can migrate it to another site automatically."
"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 stability is good, and I have never had any customers say anything bad about it. Some have used it for years and have not had any problems."
"The testing features are the most valuable features of this solution. We use the failover test feature not just for testing failovers and disaster recovery, we've also had clients use it for development purposes as well as patching purposes to test patches. We can failover the VM and then we can make any changes we want without affecting production. It's a nice sandbox for that usage."
"Zerto is so easy to use that when I showed it to my manager, he said jokingly, 'Huh. I could use it myself, I don't need you.' Zerto is most elegant."
"The initial setup was very straightforward and easy. We were able to start replication within minutes of the initial setup."
"We have had many instances where VMs were corrupted by an application owner, where they were installing something and did not create a snapshot in VMware for it. Instead of tapping into our backups, with just two clicks, we were able to restore the VM back to its original state. It helps a lot in the day-to-day running of our business."
"With Zerto, we were able to replicate our virtual servers to a remote DR site across a WAN connection."
"One of the valuable features is the ability to re-IP on the fly, because it makes the migration a lot smoother on the system end."
"It is convenient to use because the API allows for seamless integration when performing our day-to-day operations."
"The initial setup of VMware SRM isn't straightforward because many customizations are required since it helps in the recovery of your IT environment."
"The biggest issue for us is that this product does not have any demo for customers."
"The solution must provide better integration with third-party vendors."
"There is room for improvement in the automation and orchestration aspects of this solution."
"The administration guides can be complicated and difficult to use, so it would be helpful if it was made easier."
"The version we are currently using is not the latest and greatest but it has buggy behavior in some browsers."
"Currently, there is a limitation of consolidating only 15 sites per SRM."
"The configuration process could be improved."
"It would be difficult to do, but I would love it if Zerto handled some of the scripting and things necessary to do a recovery. For example, it would be helpful if the solution could update the DNS to point to a new location. It would be nice to automate some of those tasks that you have to do to recover a VM and they were kinda out-of-the-box point-and-click things rather than things that required you to write a script."
"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 see better notifications when the sync is off for an extended length of time."
"This solution could be improved by including some sort of compression or de-duplication for the same type of files."
"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's connectivity with automation platforms could be improved. For example, vCenter can use a VMware-developed tool called Site Recovery Manager. That can be integrated with automation platforms such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet, to perform automated, self-sufficient recoveries to essentially avoid any downtime. To my knowledge, Zerto does not have integration with those platforms."
"The only issue I've ever had is that I wish that Zerto would work more closely with VMware. There have been a few times that Zerto has released an update but it wasn't supported with that version of VMware. I would like them to coordinate their updates with VMware's updates."
"The alerting could be fine tuned and improved. It does a lot of alerts, but it's a little bit cumbersome to modify them."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 70 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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