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.
"It has a good and effective user interface."
"It is easy to implement for my clients."
"The stability of SRM has been excellent. It gets a nine-out-of-ten."
"Combined with RecoverPoint, it offers zero RPO and zero RTO."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of operations."
"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery testing."
"The solution is very flexible."
"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."
"In terms of the most valuable features, having the failover tests where you can see where your actual RTO and RPO would be is really nice, especially for the management level. I really liked the ease of when I need to do a file or folder restore off the cuff. Usually, it takes me less than five minutes to do it, including the mounting of the actual image. That was one thing with Unitrends, it was a similar process but if that backup had aged off of the system, then you had to go to the archive and you find the right disks, load them in, and then actually mount the image."
"It reduced the backup recovery time of our main backup solution by several hours. It's reduced our time because before we have to build a system and restore the data, we install the application and restore the data that took us at least a good 24 hours to do that. And now it's really minutes for us to recover our backup solution."
"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."
"The continuation to the public cloud has been especially helpful where I can pretty much work with things like hosts and clusters as part of the data center."
"There are several valuable features because of the way we use it. The backup and restore features are definitely indispensable."
"I would give it an eight out of 10, if not a nine out of 10, when it comes to ease of use."
"The solution's most valuable aspect is allowing a failover from our remote sites to our data center. Our remote sites have failed several times, and on each occasion, we were able to bring a plant back online within 30 minutes, even though the hardware repair took many days."
"Four years ago when we did a PoC between two other vendors and Zerto, there were two features of Zerto that sold it, hands-down. One was the ease of creating protection groups, the ease with which our engineers could create protection, add virtual machines into the Zerto product, and get them under DR protection."
"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."
"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."
"Lacks stability and as a result requires continuous monitoring."
"The technical support is not quick enough to respond when a user tries to contact them."
"What I think can be improved is the data replication aspect."
"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."
"I would like to see better integration with other storage solutions. I would hope to see that within the next two or three years."
"Cost is definitely an area where the product could be improved."
"Zerto generates many false positive alerts, which is annoying. I still have thousands of alerts in my inbox, and those are false alerts. When I check there's actually no problem."
"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."
"They could iron out the licensing aspect of it, so we might be a bit quicker when implementing and starting to use it."
"We're not fully satisfied with the support team."
"Zerto needs to improve its documentation."
"The documentation needs improvement in terms of the setup, getting enough detail, and getting that up to speed."
"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."
"Certain areas were designed and work fine for VMware but are under development for Hyper-V. Eventually, all features will work for both platforms."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 69 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 234 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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