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.
"I like how VMware SRM is able to automate and orchestrate disaster recovery."
"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 strong when it comes to protection and analytics, with the latter being added later on."
"The stability of SRM has been excellent. It gets a nine-out-of-ten."
"This SRM solution can improve your footprint within a data center."
"Incorporating non-disruptive testing capability in disaster recovery procedures has significantly benefited the overall recovery testing processes."
"In terms of recovery, if you have a test job script, you can put it on top of it. You can create custom steps so that it will be more granular. It will be an easy, one click solution when it comes to the recovery application."
"During a failover to a DR site, Zerto can automatically change the IP address of servers."
"RPO time for the copied-off VMs appears to be quite short."
"The ease of setting up replication, the speed, and the ease with which I can fail over and fail back are all excellent aspects of the solution."
"The most valuable tool is the dashboard, which allows us to immediately check the DLP status, replication data, and all other data needed to have cleaner and immediate control of the situation."
"It is way faster than just manually moving VMDKs, etc. It saves hours of time and a significant amount of money."
"The replication works really well. We perform multiple tests a month and annual tests for our tier-one and many of our tier-two apps... Migrating systems as a failover rollback or a system move are two of the functions that I like the most."
"The ability to perform DR testing to ensure data integrity is critical."
"The replication and recovery features are the most valuable... On two occasions, other departments in our organization reported issues with specific virtual machines. We used the checkpoint feature of the Zerto to enable the recovery of those machines to a point that was a few minutes prior to the problem."
"There is room for improvement in the automation and orchestration aspects of this solution."
"There are many functionality problems with the product currently. It is also slow and unstable."
"The configuration process could be improved."
"I would like to see better integration with other storage solutions. I would hope to see that within the next two or three years."
"The solution must provide better integration with third-party vendors."
"You need a lot of knowledge to work with the interface because it is not really easy to use, and it would be great if the dashboard were simplified."
"Cost is definitely an area where the product could be improved."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"I would like to see a couple of details regarding awareness of VM events coming outside of ZVR."
"Their data backup and restore have some ways to go."
"I would like to request better reporting in Zerto. I can see the data that I need in the console, but if I need to put the data or the history into a report, it is difficult. It is something that auditors might require, so reporting is something that needs to be improved."
"The replication appliances tend to have issues when they recover from being powered off when a host is in maintenance mode. Sometimes you have to do a manual task where you go in and detach hard disks that are no longer in use, to get the replication appliances to power back on. There are some improvements to be made around the way those recover."
"I want to have an OVF or some local deployment where I can deploy the ZVRA rather than having to push it from the console. Some of our smaller remote sites have relatively poor bandwidth, and they can't keep up with the constant deployment stream from our center console, meaning we have to find some creative hours to get around the bandwidth bottlenecks. If I could push out a small install file, install it locally, and then reach back to the console, that would be excellent."
"When we are trying to upgrade any virtual machines, we have to stop the virtual machines that have been replicated in Zerto and then upgrade or update to the virtual machines onsite. Instead of having to do it manually, there should be some way of automating that particular function."
"The only thing I really don't like about Zerto is that the ZVM has to be a Windows server. I can spin up any OBA template whenever I want to, but if it has an OS that's tied to it, then I have to involve the OS team from my company. That drives me crazy."
"I don't like the evacuation process. The host evacuation process could be a little simpler too. It takes our maintenance a bit longer, when we are doing host maintenance, because we still need to evacuate the vRAs manually. I know they tried to make it more automatic, but it is not quite there yet."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 27 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 127 reviews. VMware SRM is rated 8.0, while Zerto is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of VMware SRM writes "Robust reliability tool ensuring high availability and disaster recovery for virtualized environments". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zerto writes "Our average recovery time is now in seconds, and we can spin up a test version without affecting our production environment". 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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