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 very flexible."
"Our systems fail over using SRM. So, we do a big bang DR, which is biannual, and we fail over our fairly massive Epic electronic health record (EHR) and our core applications. It takes us about 30 minutes to fail over using SRM, which is pretty good. In most hospitals that have Epic installed, Epic does the audit to make sure that we can fail over if something were to happen. Normally, sites will have a DR solution specific to the EHR, but right now, our pain point is the third-party tier-one clinical applications."
"It is a very stable solution...I was involved in VMware SRM's deployment phase two years ago, and it was an easy process."
"The solution is consistent."
"SRM's best feature is automation."
"We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable."
"Testing failover capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can independently run the disaster recovery without disturbing the production instances."
"The near-synchronous replication is one of the primary reasons we're using Zerto because we have recovery intervals of sub-five seconds. On a scale of 10, where 10 is "very important", this feature is a 10."
"The feature I've found most valuable so far has been the ability to migrate the VMs from Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor. It's made our migration seamless. In the beginning, we were looking at freeware tools, and it was just a massive headache. Zerto solved a lot of the roadblocks that we'd run into in the past."
"Journaling allows us to leverage Zerto's journal for sub-minute recoveries, instead of having to wait for the storage array to replicate."
"Zerto's user-friendliness is valuable."
"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..."
"For most use cases, the failover time is a handful of minutes, if that. A single user can run the system."
"Zerto is essential for protecting critical workloads. We don't protect all of our VMs, but some need to be recovered in a timely manner. The recovery time is almost immediate."
"During a failover to a DR site, Zerto can automatically change the IP address of servers."
"There are many functionality problems with the product currently. It is also slow and unstable."
"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 solution is on the expensive side."
"You cannot use VMware SRM in conjunction with storage replication software."
"What I think can be improved is the data replication aspect."
"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 technical support is not quick enough to respond when a user tries to contact them."
"SRM may hit some OS issues related to IP changes, but they are usually OS related, especially in the 2008 realm."
"Overall, Zerto is doing a very good job. We have experienced a few downtimes on networking. Most of the time, they come up with a solution immediately to sort out any challenge that may affect data flow or data migration. It does not happen frequently. We might experience it once in two months, but when we face any downtime, it does not impact the data."
"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."
"The GUI could be streamlined a bit more to enhance the administrative tasks."
"An area for improvement is the support because it gets really expensive. They need to make it a little cheaper. Support also takes time."
"We have had some issues with trying to get certain parts of the backup or restore functionality to work."
"One improvement that could make it easier would be to have an easier way to track journal usage and a little bit more training around journal sizing. I've done all the training and the journal is still a gray area. There is confusion surrounding how it's billed and how we should bill clients. It would be easier if it had billing suggestions or billing best practices for our clients to make sure that we're not leaving money on the table."
"The backup end of this solution could be improved. We tried using it as a full backup solution and it took way too long to complete at least one backup."
"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."
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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