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 simple to use and has effective automation."
"The solution can be deployed in a couple of hours."
"SRM's best feature is automation."
"It's easy to use and the interface is quite simple."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of operations."
"The product is evolving and the vendor is committed to change."
"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 eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"Zerto's ability to test failovers with a record of how long it takes to fail the motor is beneficial, as it allows us to know the timing in the event we have to do it live."
"The ease of failover and test environments has proven invaluable."
"In our DR testing, Zerto allows us to go work on other things while it takes care of everything. That's valuable because we know that we can still hit all of our SLAs in a real disaster."
"The solution's most valuable aspect is allowing a failover from our remote sites to our data center. Our remote sites have failed several times, and on each occasion, we were able to bring a plant back online within 30 minutes, even though the hardware repair took many days."
"With Zerto, we were able to replicate our virtual servers to a remote DR site across a WAN connection."
"The continuous data protection is great. We love it because I can see exactly how many seconds behind real-time we are, which is usually under 10 seconds. It keeps things up to date. We love the product."
"We had a disaster recovery four or five years ago. I can't remember what happened, but I believe something crashed in our data center, like a power outage. We did a failover of our network using Zerto from production to disaster recovery. We successfully completed the failover process in three or four hours without issue. The data was current, and the application owners could access their data and continue working while the issue was resolved."
"Since the log files are continuously transmitted, the granularity of restores is amazing."
"In my view, if VMware comes up with an appliance-based solution like vCenter Server (which was also Windows-based), it will be much easier for deployment. I"
"They could enhance the automation features for the product."
"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 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."
"In my opinion, the integration with Peer Persistent Storage could be improved."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"The configuration process could be improved."
"We would like more mobile options. If we are at a restaurant or out and about in our normal daily lives, we would like to be able to interface via our mobiles."
"I would like Zerto to enhance the continuous backup aspect."
"When it comes to a solution, one of the things the management wants is to standardize platforms. That's why when Rubrik came out with their solution, they wanted to look at it. For instance, if you have multiple technologies, you're going to need admins to manage all those different ones. I would like Zerto to be something that fits all our needs, including the backup that Rubrik provides, but I understand that not all solutions can be that way."
"It would be nice if Zerto offered OVFs, which are custom-built VMs that you can install on your virtualized environment. At the moment, I have the Zerto sitting on two custom-built Windows servers, which creates a lot of overhead. I'm waiting for them to create an OVF file, which is a built and hardened version of their Zerto server that I can just install wherever with a couple of mouse clicks."
"There are still some pieces in testing that aren't automated. There are still some built-in scripts or workflows I wish Zerto would do out-of-the-box, versus having to PowerShell or have a vendor create it, or create it myself."
"I had a couple of questions after deployment, but nothing major, about a couple of ways I could tweak it."
"We had some issues with replication, especially on Linux, but we have already resolved them."
"You can create a VPG and put anywhere from one to 17 servers in that group. We build them one by one. If something changes in VMware, it would be nice to be able to go in and change that VPG, having it update without messing up. When you change them now, it only applies to the copies from the points when you changed it. I wish it would purge that older data from the past. Right now, we have to build a new VPG, which is not a big deal as it is just a few screens."
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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