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.
"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."
"VMware is one of the best products in the industry when it comes to virtualization."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with our Nutanix environment."
"If you want to do failover, it works without any problem."
"It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"I would rate the ease of setting up and configuring my recovery plan in VMware SRM, a ten out of ten, with ten being the easiest."
"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."
"Its capability to schedule, write and configure the recovery and scheduled steps, such that you don't have to come in and start manually trying to recover the entire machine. You just push a button to recover the VMware and everything is done."
"We use to use VMware replication appliances to attempt to replicate our VMs to remote locations and servers, but Zerto's one-to-many replication options with deduplication have made the process much simpler without having to constantly worry about the versions of each driver."
"I give Zerto's stability a nine out of ten."
"The near-synchronous replication is key. That has allowed us to provide the low RPOs that we promise. For key systems, that has been the deciding factor."
"I found VM level replication and being able to group the VM levels to be valuable. I like not having to worry about whether a particular VM is in the right storage group; some of those sorts of things would trip us up previously."
"I like that the failover is simple and that it's a stable platform. It makes it easy for us to do failovers in the event that we have an issue. It also makes it easier to do test failovers because we can test it prior to actually doing a real failover. This means that we can pull things back or commit them over on the other side. Zerto streamlines the process instead of having to have a whole team of people who are dedicated to disaster recovery."
"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."
"This product is impressively easy to use. It's dummy-proof, once it's set up."
"There wasn't anything in place that compares to what we're getting from Zerto. Before Zerto, we didn't have a proper disaster recovery program or application in place. We had a simple backup solution where we could back up our data every 24 hours. So we went from that to being able to recover full systems within a matter of minutes. With Zerto, if we do have an event or disaster, we know that we can recover from that much quicker than we were able to before."
"Currently, there is a limitation of consolidating only 15 sites per SRM."
"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 version we are currently using is not the latest and greatest but it has buggy behavior in some browsers."
"I would like to see this solution be more scalable."
"The two vCenters have to be synchronized, which sometimes gives us problems because Keberos does not tolerate more than five minutes in time difference."
"SRM has to be installed on two separate data centers, so both have to be coordinated very well, which becomes complicated when configuring the software for disaster recovery."
"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."
"If you have a failover case, you need to work on it manually. It would be helpful if this could be automated. It would simplify things."
"The onset of configuring an environment in the cloud is difficult and could be easier to do."
"From the technical side, there can be a little bit more PowerShell integration. I know it leverages APIs, but people still use PowerShell. Some people would rather use PowerShell if that is an option."
"I need to get up to the latest version so I can move my journals to a particular LUN, saving them with a particular storage altogether, rather than with the virtual machine. This is not available until I upgrade, and I need to upgrade all my hypervisors. This would be something that would be nice to have if it could be used on older versions."
"Zerto's near-synchronous replication is excellent when it works. I'm trying to be nice to them because I like the product a lot, but we're having a lot of difficulty with it in our environment."
"Zerto's effect on our RPO can be improved."
"When we do failover and failback, it doesn't maintain some of the settings that it should and I don't really understand why that happens."
"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."
"Not all of the knowledge required for implementing Zerto is available in their online documentation for non-partners."
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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