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 can be deployed in a couple of hours."
"The solution is scalable."
"This SRM solution can improve your footprint within a data center."
"VMware SRM is a very nice tool for disaster recovery for virtual environments."
"The stability of SRM has been excellent. It gets a nine-out-of-ten."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with our Nutanix environment."
"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 product functionality is fairly high-quality."
"The way we can use checkpoints from each VM to restore them is an excellent feature, and the replication is great."
"A great Zerto feature is the non-intrusive failover of the application, similar to an actual disaster recovery test without impacting the services that are currently online. Sometimes customers need to failover to an isolated environment and validate an application without impacting the production environment: we can achieve this goal with Zerto. Again, we can do regular testing in a non-impactful way using isolated testing. For customers of our DRaaS we include once a year, a live test that is more like what would happen if the customer lost the production site. Near-synchronous replication is one of the benefits of Zerto that drove us to choose it over some others. With typical backup and recovery solutions, the recovery point typically is about 24 hours. With the near-synchronous replication, recovery point objectives tend to be minutes or a few seconds if the bandwidth is adequate. That's one of the major benefits of Zerto: there's no need to run incremental backups every xx minutes. And the recovery time is fairly quick as well, like a shutdown and reboot of a VM. Eventually, the VPGs (Virtual Protection Groups) allow to grouping of one or more VMs into a single entity, ensuring every point in time inserted into Zerto’s journal (a checkpoint) is from the same point in time for all components within the protection group. This allows easy recovery of an entire application and its dependencies to a consistent point in time. Zerto is also a very easy product to use."
"We are moving to a new data center. There are several VMs that we have to move over there that have RDM disks or SQL clusters. Those are the hardest things to move at this point in time, but now that I have the setup and it is ready to go, all we have to do is just flip the switch and get everything over where they are supposed to be. It is going to be a lifesaver for me. It will save me a whole lot of time in putting things back together."
"Another big attraction is the near zero RPO. A lot of other products have minutes, half-hour, or an hour RPO. We have proof indicating that Zerto is near zero, or a matter of minutes, as far as the RTO is concerned. So again, that's another attractive offering where you can actually fail something over and bring that back up in a target location in a matter of minutes. Meaning very little data loss as far as recovery time. It's fantastic."
"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."
"A new feature is the One-To-Many VPG allowing a VM to be replicated at up to three different locations, including local."
"We own another solution called VMware Site Recovery Manager, SRM. We have licenses for our entire environment and we still decided not to use it. That's how big the difference was in the experience that Zerto provides."
"We now have the ability to replicate critical data to a secure, off-site location that can be brought back in seconds if needed."
"I would like to see better integration with other storage solutions. I would hope to see that within the next two or three years."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"The user experience could be more friendly."
"Technical support can take some time to respond."
"The solution currently has a five-minute RPO, meaning if the VM goes down we can lose up to five minutes of data which is a big deal when it relates to database replication."
"Currently, there is a limitation of consolidating only 15 sites per SRM."
"This product is not appropriate for those moving to a broader cloud footprint."
"The initial setup of VMware SRM isn't straightforward because many customizations are required since it helps in the recovery of your IT environment."
"We're not fully satisfied with the support team."
"Increased granularity in how long to keep the journal would be nice."
"There's a mandatory VMware version, so we need to update our VMs in order to access our data. Zerto should work with all VMware versions."
"They are not cheap. They are more expensive than others."
"I would like to have an overall orchestration capability that would enable you to do multiple VPGs in some sort of order, with delays in between."
"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."
"In terms of improvement, it would be helpful if the implementation team had a better best practices guide and made sure things like the journaling are very clearly understood."
"I would like to see a couple of details regarding awareness of VM events coming outside of ZVR."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 69 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 233 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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