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 scalable."
"The solution is simple to use and has effective automation."
"The thing I like the most about SMR is the reduced cost of management."
"The solution is strong when it comes to protection and analytics, with the latter being added later on."
"It is a stable solution...The solution's technical support is excellent."
"The product is evolving and the vendor is committed to change."
"The most valuable feature of VMware SRM is its integration with the VMware platform."
"It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"Zerto has improved our restoration time and made it easier to test software upgrades. It has simplified tasks like decommissioning a site and replicating virtual machines from one location to another."
"We can spin up our environment in DR without affecting production, which is probably the biggest feature for us. We have the ability to do passive testing. We can even test scenarios, such as installing software or changing software. We can make modifications without affecting our production environment. So, the test functionality of being able to test the failover solution and being able to bring up our virtual machines in a test mode is the biggest benefit."
"Journaling allows us to leverage Zerto's journal for sub-minute recoveries, instead of having to wait for the storage array to replicate."
"The orchestration and automation of the DR and how it replicates the VMs and then picks them up in the DR site have been most valuable."
"For most use cases, the failover time is a handful of minutes, if that. A single user can run the system."
"The one-to-many replication functionality is helpful. While we were protecting our VMs in Azure, we were able to use the one-to-many feature to also replicate the same VMs to our new data center, in preparation for data center migration."
"The stability is good, and I have never had any customers say anything bad about it. Some have used it for years and have not had any problems."
"The simplicity of use is valuable. It is easy. We just click Failover and do it. It is pretty straightforward. If someone wants to do a test failover, they log in to the console and do a test failover"
"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 technical support is not very good and needs to make an effort to improve."
"We've had configuration issues on occasion. We start to fail over, and then we have to call it off because the configuration is not right, or the data stores aren't configured correctly in the secondary data center. Oftentimes, it is just the experience level of the team, and we have to bring in the vendor to help and validate our configuration."
"I would like to see this solution be more scalable."
"The technical support is not quick enough to respond when a user tries to contact them."
"The product's stability could be better."
"This product is not appropriate for those moving to a broader cloud footprint."
"What I think can be improved is the data replication aspect."
"Whenever we do a failover, there's a confirmation box that shows up later. It's a little hard to see sometimes... A popup to continue would be a little bit better because then you're not sitting and waiting for something and it's already there."
"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."
"We have had issues with licensing, where the license we've been given by Zerto support doesn't include VSS replication, which was a pain at the time."
"The product could benefit from improvements in automation, specifically in the area of failovers."
"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."
"For what we got it for, it does it great. I use a different solution for my disk-to-disk local backups to where I can have a local backup of files. I don't think Zerto does that well to where it keeps a memory of the files that are there. Basically, when something is deleted on Zerto, it gets deleted on the replicated version. So, some sort of snapshotting or something where I could have backups at different points in time of files would be a really helpful tool."
"It would be great if Zerto could automate replication more."
"It has a file restore feature, which we have tried to use. We have had some issues with that, because the drives are compressed in our main file system. It is a Windows-based file server. So, it compresses the shares and can't restore those by default."
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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