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 eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"I like how VMware SRM is able to automate and orchestrate disaster recovery."
"VMware is one of the best products in the industry when it comes to virtualization."
"The solution is very flexible."
"The installation and initial setup are straightforward."
"It's easy to use and the interface is quite simple."
"The most valuable feature of VMware SRM is its integration with the VMware platform."
"The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly."
"The initial setup was very straightforward and easy. We were able to start replication within minutes of the initial setup."
"Consistency Groups: If you replicate groups of VMs, then during failover, all of the VMs in groups are failed over to the exact same point in time."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to recover critical systems, such as public safety, within a few minutes. In addition, the RPO is six seconds of data loss, tops."
"The Zerto university for training staff is very useful."
"Its user interface is excellent, and when it comes to data duplication, Zerto is very fast."
"We are doing continuous data protection. It works flawlessly. Our recovery points are measured in seconds. We have all these "baby snapshots" throughout the course of the day, so we can roll a VM back to any point in time, spin it up, and away we go. We're actively using that. It works great."
"I've been fortunate enough not to need to rely on Zerto in an actual disaster, but we do testing every year. Sometimes, it's multiple times annually or at the year's end. It takes the recovery workflow, which would normally take a lot of planning, and reduces that to just a few minutes."
"I found VM level replication and being able to group the VM levels to be valuable. I like not having to worry about whether a particular VM is in the right storage group; some of those sorts of things would trip us up previously."
"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."
"SRM may hit some OS issues related to IP changes, but they are usually OS related, especially in the 2008 realm."
"It would be good if this solution could integrate configuration management software such as Chef Infra."
"The solution could improve by removing some of the limitations we have been facing. There could be better integrated."
"Currently, there is a limitation of consolidating only 15 sites per SRM."
"The two vCenters have to be synchronized, which sometimes gives us problems because Keberos does not tolerate more than five minutes in time difference."
"The administration guides can be complicated and difficult to use, so it would be helpful if it was made easier."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"There needs to be more flexibility in the licensing."
"It would be advantageous if Zerto had plugins for Infoblox, Cisco, or load balancers, as this would enable us to better manage those records."
"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."
"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."
"We would love to have a native management pack for vROps and to be able to view a dashboard and metrics for BPGs within vROps. We would like to have a single view for monitoring and provide customers with dashboards so they can see their own BPGs."
"In general, the solution is pretty good, but because it is geared toward simplicity, sometimes, when things go wrong, the answer is not very detailed so that things can be solved quickly. If things do go wrong, it does require a little bit deeper troubleshooting to resolve the issues. That's the only area where improvement could occur. There should be a little bit more details about if things go wrong, how to remedy them."
"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."
"The only complaint is that if I remove a host from a cluster, it does not like that. If I move and put the host in maintenance mode to fix it, and vRA is down, Zerto does not like it. Zerto should figure out that this host has an issue and it went down. Zerto should then let me upload that vRA information to another vRA."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 69 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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