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.
"I like how VMware SRM is able to automate and orchestrate disaster recovery."
"The replication is the solution's most valuable feature. If we have some issues on the VM in the main site we can migrate it to another site automatically."
"The solution runs well in the background, just in case we need it."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with our Nutanix environment."
"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery testing."
"SRM's best feature is automation."
"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."
"The UI is very user-friendly and testing is easy."
"The near-synchronous replication is one of the primary reasons we're using Zerto because we have recovery intervals of sub-five seconds. On a scale of 10, where 10 is "very important", this feature is a 10."
"We relocated all our virtual machines from Belgium to Budapest, Hungary. I am not sure how we would have done it without Zerto, because we were able to keep the data in sync. We would have needed to have a lot more expensive storage products online at the time that could have kept that replication. From what I have seen from other methods, that would have required a much higher amount of bandwidth as well, then the cost would have been extreme. The mechanisms available to us with a storage space replication would have been more labor-intensive and prone to error. It was much easier and more successful with Zerto than other ways at our disposal."
"We can recover both systems on-premises and in the public cloud."
"When we need to failover or move workloads, Zerto significantly decreases both the time it takes and the number of people involved. It only takes a single person to activate a failover and we can pretty much automate everything else."
"It is incredibly granular and I really appreciate that."
"The replication for DR is really good, and the test failover within the application is really solid, along with the ability to manipulate RDMs or remove them."
"I like the granularity of the checkpoints."
"We can failover to an isolated environment and validate the application without impacting the production environment. We can do more testing in a non-impactful way..."
"SRM may hit some OS issues related to IP changes, but they are usually OS related, especially in the 2008 realm."
"VMware SRM's platform agnostics should support on-cloud usage as well."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"I would like to see better integration with other storage solutions. I would hope to see that within the next two or three years."
"Lacks stability and as a result requires continuous monitoring."
"Timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas. When this happens, we encounter errors."
"They could enhance the automation features for the product."
"In my opinion, the integration with Peer Persistent Storage could be improved."
"It would be nice if we were able to purchase single licenses for Zerto. As it is now, scaling requires that we purchase a multi-pack."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"The performance was generally good, but occasional lag disrupted the flow, leaving room for improvement."
"An area for improvement is the support because it gets really expensive. They need to make it a little cheaper. Support also takes time."
"If I have to reboot a virtual machine host, I have issues with Zerto catching up afterward. That's about the only thing I would say needs improvement. Sometimes, when I have to do maintenance, Zerto takes a little bit to catch up. That's understandable."
"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."
"They had a bug recently that has come up and caused some issues. They currently have a bug in their production versions that prevents their product from functioning in some scenarios, and we have hit a few of those scenarios."
"Now, everything is moving to the cloud and many modern app solutions are based on virtualization and cloud, however, for situations where Unix platforms are used, we'd like them to be able to support that."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 70 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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