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 most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly."
"The solution is simple to use and has effective automation."
"VMware SRM is very effective between two sites with identical twin storage, you can have synchronization between the two sites."
"VMware SRM replicates the VM from one site to another, and it helps us orchestrate the powering of VMs and DR when the DC goes down."
"VMware SRM's most valuable features are its convenience and its use of stretched clusters."
"Incorporating non-disruptive testing capability in disaster recovery procedures has significantly benefited the overall recovery testing processes."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution is very flexible."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of upgrades."
"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."
"In terms of the most valuable features, having the failover tests where you can see where your actual RTO and RPO would be is really nice, especially for the management level. I really liked the ease of when I need to do a file or folder restore off the cuff. Usually, it takes me less than five minutes to do it, including the mounting of the actual image. That was one thing with Unitrends, it was a similar process but if that backup had aged off of the system, then you had to go to the archive and you find the right disks, load them in, and then actually mount the image."
"It works really well. It's simple to set up and works well. Moreover, disaster recovery to the cloud to our organization is very important. We actually had to use it three years ago, and it worked out well for us."
"The ability to quickly bring up VMs within a test environment allows us to test our disaster recovery functions and ensures that they would function just as well in an actual disaster scenario."
"Stable disaster recovery solution with a very simple setup and fast failover."
"It reduced the backup recovery time of our main backup solution by several hours. It's reduced our time because before we have to build a system and restore the data, we install the application and restore the data that took us at least a good 24 hours to do that. And now it's really minutes for us to recover our backup solution."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"The biggest issue for us is that this product does not have any demo for customers."
"The product's stability could be better."
"There are many functionality problems with the product currently. It is also slow and unstable."
"It would be good if this solution could integrate configuration management software such as Chef Infra."
"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."
"Timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas. When this happens, we encounter errors."
"Technical support needs improvement, they are not very responsive."
"Right now, our production environment runs on-premises, and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. However, our development runs on that hardware. In the case of a DR event, we would need to shut down development and bring up our secondary copy of production. We're hoping that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that."
"The backup functions are in need of improvement."
"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."
"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 would like to see a couple of details regarding awareness of VM events coming outside of ZVR."
"Zerto's effect on our RPO can be improved."
"There are quite a few elements in the long-term retention areas that I wish were better. The bio-level recovery indexing of backups is the area I struggle with the most. That's probably because I desire to do tasks that ordinary users wouldn't do with the solution. The standard medium to large customer would probably never ask for anything like I ask for, so I think it's pretty good the way it is. I'm excited to see some of the new improvements coming in the 9.5 version. Some of the streamlines and how the product presents itself for some of the recovery features could be better."
"We're not fully satisfied with the support team."
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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