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.
"Incorporating non-disruptive testing capability in disaster recovery procedures has significantly benefited the overall recovery testing processes."
"The thing I like the most about SMR is the reduced cost of management."
"It is easy to implement for my clients."
"The solution is simple to use and has effective automation."
"VMware is one of the best products in the industry when it comes to virtualization."
"It is a stable solution...The solution's technical support is excellent."
"The product functionality is fairly high-quality."
"The product is evolving and the vendor is committed to change."
"We selected Zerto because the RPO is extremely low, so you can get that server back up almost immediately. That was a huge thing. Also, the ability to do failover tests, where you can test your environment, but not have it impact your production environment, was huge."
"We've seen a massive benefit from using Zerto in terms of time savings and consistency. You see a consistent outcome every time you do the conversions. We're moving from one platform to another, but the payloads in what we're moving are different. We see consistent delivery."
"The recovery was pretty seamless. It took about a minute for it to kick over when we did our testing. So, it wasn't a long downtime."
"From a management perspective, one of the biggest benefits is to see the excitement of your engineers having a tool that truly enables them, really making their lives easier. That is something that I love. When we came out of the PoC, their eyes were just wide with excitement of what was possible now."
"The most valuable feature is the point in time recovery. This allows us to recover at any point in time, up to a minute or so."
"I prefer Zerto because it's a little more automated. VMware has more requirements... It's a little more click-and-go versus click-and-monitor..."
"We are in the process of switching over our production data center and Zerto has been a true time-saver that has cost us zero downtime."
"It is pretty easy to use. The interface is intuitive and easy to use. Once you set it up, it just works. So, it is great."
"One thing which is lacking from the SRM is reporting."
"Cost is definitely an area where the product could be improved."
"SRM may hit some OS issues related to IP changes, but they are usually OS related, especially in the 2008 realm."
"The technical support is not quick enough to respond when a user tries to contact them."
"VMware SRM lacks certain functions that other platforms have, such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles."
"I would like to see better integration with other storage solutions. I would hope to see that within the next two or three years."
"An improvement for SRM would be better interface compatibility with other products."
"It would be good if this solution could integrate configuration management software such as Chef Infra."
"I haven't been a super big fan of the support area. The support could really be better in terms of responsiveness. I've had some issues that took two or three days to get resolved. Once I got to the right person, they were resolved quickly, but it took a while to get to that person."
"One thing I would like to see in their roadmap is introducing long-term storage in the cloud such as Azure or AWS. They can make it more seamless."
"Its initial setup can be better. It looks easy, but if you do not have things in the right place, it is not as easy as it looks. Some of the instructions were not clear. They were a little bit confusing. For example, while setting up SSH initially, it was a little bit unclear if I needed to use a regular credential or some other credential. This was one of the things that was a little fuzzy, and we had to get somebody else involved to help us out."
"We do have some sites that are very low-bandwidth sites. Zerto is able to set throttling in the solution, but the throttling is set at a site-wide level. In those instances that have very low bandwidth, I can't reduce the throttling on that site. It would be nice if there were a way to control the throttling by the protection group for a specific workload."
"For special situations, there are options within advanced settings. You don't have to dig too far for them, but they're not quite as straightforward."
"There needs to be more flexibility in the licensing."
"Maybe the reporting for the failover test could be a little better."
"When building out a VPG and doing the machine types within Azure, they were not coming across correctly. It would say it had a CPU and memory of a specific type, but it was not accurate... It was a bug and they were working on it."
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.
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.