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.
"The stability of SRM has been excellent. It gets a nine-out-of-ten."
"Virtual Machine Recovery during DR situation, with automation and easy to use menus and options."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can independently run the disaster recovery without disturbing the production instances."
"VMware SRM replicates the VM from one site to another, and it helps us orchestrate the powering of VMs and DR when the DC goes down."
"The product functionality is fairly high-quality."
"The solution is consistent."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of operations."
"The solution runs well in the background, just in case we need it."
"It's one of the easiest products out there, as far as managing and using it go. The UI is pretty dead simple."
"The instant recovery at DR locations is the most valuable feature. We're required to do periodic DR tests of critical databases, including Oracle and Microsoft SQL. We have recovery point objectives set for specific databases and we need to be able to achieve them. Zerto helps solve that business problem."
"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."
"The replication piece with the built-in WAN compression is important because the network circuit that we send our replication traffic across isn't actually behind our normal WAN accelerators. We were able to use Zerto's built-in WAN acceleration to help those workloads compress."
"There are two things that are keeping us with the solution: 1. It does a very good job of keeping the data in sync at all times. 2. In the event of a failover or in the event of a contingency, we are able to retrieve the data very quickly without any issues."
"One of the most valuable features, something that I wasn't even anticipating, is the file backups. We weren't even considering Zerto to do restores, but it actually is able to do that. Eventually, we could just use this as our backup solution."
"The replication feature where it constantly replicates and sees that data is always in sync is valuable."
"We now have the ability to replicate critical data to a secure, off-site location that can be brought back in seconds if needed."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"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."
"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 administration guides can be complicated and difficult to use, so it would be helpful if it was made easier."
"An improvement for SRM would be better interface compatibility with other products."
"You need a lot of knowledge to work with the interface because it is not really easy to use, and it would be great if the dashboard were simplified."
"Technical support needs improvement, they are not very responsive."
"The back sites sometimes are very, very complicated."
"We had some issues with replication, especially on Linux, but we have already resolved them."
"The improvement that I would like to see is a little bit easier product knowledge, things like that. It's getting a lot better than it was before because it's not as old of a product as Cisco, but if you look for something like Cisco routing and networking, you'll find millions of articles out there and it's everywhere."
"Zerto needs to improve its documentation."
"I wish they would...develop their PowerShell module to be more robust. So instead of having to rely on the API to actually include a PowerShell command, it would let you create VPGs, delete VPGs, modify VPGs, etc. This would ease the automation effort of deployment and decommissioning and I'd really appreciate that."
"Not all of the knowledge required for implementing Zerto is available in their online documentation for non-partners."
"We would like the LTR function to be able to retain the past 12 months."
"With the VPG (virtual protected group) it would be nice if you could pick individuals in the grouping instead of having to failover the whole group."
"I had a couple of questions after deployment, but nothing major, about a couple of ways I could tweak it."
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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