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 is simple to use and has effective automation."
"It made the DR process a lot faster and easier for recovery after we were familiar with the product operation."
"This SRM solution can improve your footprint within a data center."
"The product functionality is fairly high-quality."
"The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly."
"The solution is strong when it comes to protection and analytics, with the latter being added later on."
"The solution is consistent."
"The thing I like the most about SMR is the reduced cost of management."
"We have seen ROI. It reduced the time for failover and failback by 90%."
"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."
"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."
"Managing the system is easy and reliable, you can choose any VM you want to replicate to your DR Site in Combination with other VM's."
"During a failover to a DR site, Zerto can automatically change the IP address of servers."
"It is the backbone of our DR solution for critical databases that hold the data we can't afford to lose. It provided new opportunities to change how we approach disaster recovery."
"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."
"We use to use VMware replication appliances to attempt to replicate our VMs to remote locations and servers, but Zerto's one-to-many replication options with deduplication have made the process much simpler without having to constantly worry about the versions of each driver."
"Currently, there is a limitation of consolidating only 15 sites per SRM."
"The solution is on the expensive side."
"The back sites sometimes are very, very complicated."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"The version we are currently using is not the latest and greatest but it has buggy behavior in some browsers."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"What I think can be improved is the data replication aspect."
"We have had some issues with trying to get certain parts of the backup or restore functionality to work."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"It would be helpful if the reports can be generated periodically, on a schedule."
"We would like more mobile options. If we are at a restaurant or out and about in our normal daily lives, we would like to be able to interface via our mobiles."
"I wish they would...develop their PowerShell module to be more robust. So instead of having to rely on the API to actually include a PowerShell command, it would let you create VPGs, delete VPGs, modify VPGs, etc. This would ease the automation effort of deployment and decommissioning and I'd really appreciate that."
"If I have to reboot a virtual machine host, I have issues with Zerto catching up afterward. That's about the only thing I would say needs improvement. Sometimes, when I have to do maintenance, Zerto takes a little bit to catch up. That's understandable."
"The biggest pain points we have experienced are related to some of the SQL-intensive workloads just because the VPGs struggle a little bit to keep up. That might be because we are pushing too many transactions."
"I would like to have an overall orchestration capability that would enable you to do multiple VPGs in some sort of order, with delays in between."
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.
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