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."
"The solution is very flexible."
"Testing failover capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can independently run the disaster recovery without disturbing the production instances."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution can be deployed in a couple of hours."
"It's very reliable. The solution is stable."
"My impression is that the initial setup process is relatively straightforward."
"We've never had any major headaches with the virtual-protection groups. They seem to work exactly as they should. If there's ever an issue with replication, we know right away, so it's all been very reliable."
"With Zerto, we were able to replicate our virtual servers to a remote DR site across a WAN connection."
"Real-time or near real-time replication has been the most valuable feature. Our RTO is generally between six and eight seconds. The impact on our RTO is essential."
"Our RPOs and RTOs are now more in line with our other critical systems."
"It reduced the backup recovery time of our main backup solution by several hours. It's reduced our time because before we have to build a system and restore the data, we install the application and restore the data that took us at least a good 24 hours to do that. And now it's really minutes for us to recover our backup solution."
"It's one of the easiest products out there, as far as managing and using it go. The UI is pretty dead simple."
"The ease of use and simplicity in moving things without having to do a cross-v set of V-motions has been most valuable. It saves time and effort and it eliminates mistakes."
"Journaling allows us to leverage Zerto's journal for sub-minute recoveries, instead of having to wait for the storage array to replicate."
"The interface is not easy to use and can be made more user-friendly."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"In my opinion, the integration with Peer Persistent Storage could be improved."
"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."
"There are many functionality problems with the product currently. It is also slow and unstable."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"The initial setup of VMware SRM isn't straightforward because many customizations are required since it helps in the recovery of your IT environment."
"I would like to see this solution be more scalable."
"When we are trying to upgrade any virtual machines, we have to stop the virtual machines that have been replicated in Zerto and then upgrade or update to the virtual machines onsite. Instead of having to do it manually, there should be some way of automating that particular function."
"I would like Zerto to provide more detailed information when there is an issue."
"The biggest pain points we have experienced are related to some of the SQL-intensive workloads just because the VPGs struggle a little bit to keep up. That might be because we are pushing too many transactions."
"The alerting has room for improvement as it is the biggest pain point with the software. It is so bad. It is just general alerting on or off. There are so many emails all the time. You have no control over it, which is terrible. It is the worst part of the entire application. I have voiced this to Zerto hundreds of times for things like feature changes. Apparently, it's coming, but there is nothing concrete as to when you can do it."
"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."
"It is difficult to manage failing over between sites if you are at the site that was impacted."
"Analytics has a 90-day window, where it keeps data. It would be nice to have on-prem storage instead of cloud storage for that so we can keep the data for longer. Unless you discover the problem within three months, you don't know that you need the data. Then, it is gone by the time you realize there is an issue."
"For special situations, there are options within advanced settings. You don't have to dig too far for them, but they're not quite as straightforward."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 69 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 233 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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