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 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."
"The thing I like the most about SMR is the reduced cost of management."
"The product functionality is fairly high-quality."
"The replication is a key feature."
"It's very reliable. The solution is stable."
"The solution helps to improve business continuity processes. Its automatic failover and failback policies have been wonderful."
"It is easy to implement for my clients."
"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery testing."
"The biggest benefit is the application-consistent disaster recovery functionality."
"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."
"The most valuable feature for us is accelerating cloud adoption, as it helps provide greater speed for disaster recovery. Ultimately, this saves us time, as well as resources."
"In situations of failback or moving workloads, it saves us hours. If I were to have to move a four or five terabyte machine using something like VMware's virtual copy it has to install on the machine and copy the data over. Then it has to shut the machine down and do a final copy, which means there's a lot of downtime while it's doing the final copy."
"Zerto has improved our restoration time and made it easier to test software upgrades. It has simplified tasks like decommissioning a site and replicating virtual machines from one location to another."
"We've seen a massive benefit from using Zerto in terms of time savings and consistency. You see a consistent outcome every time you do the conversions. We're moving from one platform to another, but the payloads in what we're moving are different. We see consistent delivery."
"Zerto has helped reduce our organization's DR testing to seconds to minutes. We have been able to save probably close to 200 hours a year."
"Zerto's user-friendliness is valuable."
"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"
"VMware SRM lacks certain functions that other platforms have, such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles."
"The solution is on the expensive side."
"It would be better if we could get more reporting features in VMware SRM."
"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."
"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."
"The two vCenters have to be synchronized, which sometimes gives us problems because Keberos does not tolerate more than five minutes in time difference."
"An improvement for SRM would be better interface compatibility with other products."
"The replication layer can probably be improved."
"We would like the LTR function to be able to retain the past 12 months."
"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."
"I would rate them an eight out of ten because not every response is as we expect. They do resolve the issue, but sometimes customers have unusual questions, and they are not able to say how exactly to fix that or how to do something,."
"Zerto needs to improve its documentation."
"I had a couple of questions after deployment, but nothing major, about a couple of ways I could tweak it."
"This solution could be improved by being more cloud agnostic."
"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."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 71 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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