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.
"VMware is one of the best products in the industry when it comes to virtualization."
"Combined with RecoverPoint, it offers zero RPO and zero RTO."
"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."
"It's easy to use and the interface is quite simple."
"My impression is that the initial setup process is relatively straightforward."
"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 most valuable feature is disaster recovery testing."
"It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"Zerto enables us to do sandboxing failovers. You can run tests on a production environment in a sandbox and spin up a copy of your actual production environment in a few hours. When you're done with it, you can click a couple of buttons, and it's all blown away. You don't need to worry about reverting changes or interfering with your on-prem production environments."
"The one-to-many replication functionality is helpful. While we were protecting our VMs in Azure, we were able to use the one-to-many feature to also replicate the same VMs to our new data center, in preparation for data center migration."
"Our RPOs and RTOs are now more in line with our other critical systems."
"We work a lot with customers that need disaster recovery and the best possible migration approaches, and Zerto helps them minimize the amount of effort it takes to finish their upgrades or migrations."
"The ease of use is one of the best features. Previously, we were using Site Replication Manager with VMware and it was a little bit cumbersome. With Zerto, we liked the fact that it was hardware-agnostic and we were able to spin it up pretty quickly and get it working."
"Being hardware agnostic is nice in that we don't really need a 15 second recovery time. It's easy to use. It's always doing updates behind the scenes. These are the positive things. The setup is pretty easy. Building out the VPGs is pretty easy. And it works like it's supposed to."
"It helps us keep our required retention period for specific documents and allows us to recover older documents if we have to compare and recreate those."
"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..."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"The initial setup of VMware SRM isn't straightforward because many customizations are required since it helps in the recovery of your IT environment."
"The product's dashboard is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"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."
"Technical support can take some time to respond."
"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 user experience could be more friendly."
"The solution must provide better integration with third-party vendors."
"The documentation needs improvement in terms of the setup, getting enough detail, and getting that up to speed."
"I would like to request better reporting in Zerto. I can see the data that I need in the console, but if I need to put the data or the history into a report, it is difficult. It is something that auditors might require, so reporting is something that needs to be improved."
"We did look at the long-term retention backup feature of Zerto a few years ago, and at that time, it was limited. I can't say what it is right now, but at the time, its functionality was limited in terms of basically where we could save it and how we could save it. Offsite air gapping our backups is important to us to help protect against ransomware, and at the time, it couldn't do that. That would be one area that would be important before we consider using the long-term retention again. I haven't looked at it recently, and they may have addressed this in the meantime, but if not, this would be an area of improvement."
"The backup solution needs to be improved. From our perspective, Veeam and Zerto were competing products. They both do very unique things that they're very good at. For instance, Veeam can do replication well. However, it's really a backup product."
"It needs more documentation and automation features. I would like more documentation on designing an environment and network operations. On the automation side, I would like automation to clean up the environment in cases of a failed DR effort. An API interface to perform the DR exercise would also be nice."
"This solution could be improved by being more cloud agnostic."
"The biggest improvement would be exporting VPGs and a configuration of VPGs, as well as increasing or improving their IP customization rule set."
"Even though Zerto is for disaster recovery, it would be nice if it can also make backups."
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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