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's tech support gets a nine-out-of-ten. They are responsive and get you a useful reply."
"The product functionality is fairly high-quality."
"The solution can be deployed in a couple of hours."
"The solution is consistent."
"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 the integration with our Nutanix environment."
"The replication is a key feature."
"This SRM solution can improve your footprint within a data center."
"Zerto is scalable."
"A great Zerto feature is the non-intrusive failover of the application, similar to an actual disaster recovery test without impacting the services that are currently online. Sometimes customers need to failover to an isolated environment and validate an application without impacting the production environment: we can achieve this goal with Zerto. Again, we can do regular testing in a non-impactful way using isolated testing. For customers of our DRaaS we include once a year, a live test that is more like what would happen if the customer lost the production site. Near-synchronous replication is one of the benefits of Zerto that drove us to choose it over some others. With typical backup and recovery solutions, the recovery point typically is about 24 hours. With the near-synchronous replication, recovery point objectives tend to be minutes or a few seconds if the bandwidth is adequate. That's one of the major benefits of Zerto: there's no need to run incremental backups every xx minutes. And the recovery time is fairly quick as well, like a shutdown and reboot of a VM. Eventually, the VPGs (Virtual Protection Groups) allow to grouping of one or more VMs into a single entity, ensuring every point in time inserted into Zerto’s journal (a checkpoint) is from the same point in time for all components within the protection group. This allows easy recovery of an entire application and its dependencies to a consistent point in time. Zerto is also a very easy product to use."
"I like that Zerto is easy to move and that there is no effect on the user. That is, the user doesn't even know it. We're in the healthcare industry and work for a hospital. We can set up a server in no time whatsoever. It's easy for us to schedule the time because it takes only about one minute."
"The communication between the VM and the secondary data center is the most valuable feature."
"Zerto's two main features are ease of management and that the product just works. It does what they say it'll do."
"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 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."
"Zerto is intuitive. We could set everything up in the environment within a day and a half and start migrating on the third day."
"There are many functionality problems with the product currently. It is also slow and unstable."
"The back sites sometimes are very, very complicated."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"They could enhance the automation features for the product."
"The technical support is not very good and needs to make an effort to improve."
"The price, in general, could be lower."
"The solution must provide better integration with third-party vendors."
"The administration guides can be complicated and difficult to use, so it would be helpful if it was made easier."
"We would like more mobile options. If we are at a restaurant or out and about in our normal daily lives, we would like to be able to interface via our mobiles."
"I don't have any input for improvement or a critical feature request at this moment. If anything, a lower price is always better."
"We would like the LTR function to be able to retain the past 12 months."
"I would like them to add a VM host replication option. Being able to replicate host configuration between sites would be a huge benefit."
"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."
"One issue we've been having with Zerto lately is the ability to go into maintenance mode during vSphere upgrades. It doesn't have the hook into the lifecycle manager of the bump. During vCenter or ESXi upgrades, it causes VCF to fail its pre-checks because the machine doesn't power off and go into maintenance mode. It's been an issue since version 7.5 and it's impacting a basic automation function in vSphere."
"Zerto is too reliant on VMware's vCenter. It's tough to upgrade, move, or do anything related to virtual servers with vCenter."
"The backup end of this solution could be improved. We tried using it as a full backup solution and it took way too long to complete at least one backup."
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.
We monitor all Disaster Recovery (DR) Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.