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.
"SRM's best feature is automation."
"It's very reliable. The solution is stable."
"It is a stable solution...The solution's technical support is excellent."
"The solution can be deployed in a couple of hours."
"This SRM solution can improve your footprint within a data center."
"If you want to do failover, it works without any problem."
"The solution is strong when it comes to protection and analytics, with the latter being added later on."
"It made the DR process a lot faster and easier for recovery after we were familiar with the product operation."
"The dashboard was easy and the UI was simple."
"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."
"I found VM level replication and being able to group the VM levels to be valuable. I like not having to worry about whether a particular VM is in the right storage group; some of those sorts of things would trip us up previously."
"It gives us a seamless, performant data center migration. When we were migrating between physical data centers, we did what normally would have been a 72-hour job in about 18 hours. A large part of that was thanks to Zerto being able to rate limit and throttle how much data was being sent or transfers were happening. Being able to script around it and create governors was important. We didn't have that previously. That is one big use case that has saved an immense amount of time and effort."
"There wasn't anything in place that compares to what we're getting from Zerto. Before Zerto, we didn't have a proper disaster recovery program or application in place. We had a simple backup solution where we could back up our data every 24 hours. So we went from that to being able to recover full systems within a matter of minutes. With Zerto, if we do have an event or disaster, we know that we can recover from that much quicker than we were able to before."
"I like the fact that Zerto is target agnostic. It doesn't care what type of storage it writes to. The journaling is also excellent. You can easily and quickly restore to seconds before an event. The immutable data copies feature is one reason we adopted Zerto. That's one of its selling points."
"The ease of setting up replication, the speed, and the ease with which I can fail over and fail back are all excellent aspects of the solution."
"It is incredibly granular and I really appreciate that."
"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."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"Technical support can take some time to respond."
"The version we are currently using is not the latest and greatest but it has buggy behavior in some browsers."
"The product's stability could be better."
"Currently, there is a limitation of consolidating only 15 sites per SRM."
"The solution is on the expensive side."
"VMware SRM's platform agnostics should support on-cloud usage as well."
"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."
"I would like Zerto to provide more detailed information when there is an issue."
"In Azure... We have to make sure that every resource group is tagged correctly, with the correct team and department because we have to bill them at the end of the month. The problem is that Zerto does not have that ability. When the product fails over or migrates a VM from on-prem, or even within Azure, to another site, it does not give you the option of selecting an existing resource group."
"It has some quirks. We have quirks with appliances. Some things don't really work as expected, but it is minor."
"An area for improvement is the support because it gets really expensive. They need to make it a little cheaper. Support also takes time."
"I had a couple of questions after deployment, but nothing major, about a couple of ways I could tweak it."
"The biggest improvement would be exporting VPGs and a configuration of VPGs, as well as increasing or improving their IP customization rule set."
"It would also be nice if you could update without having to download a new installation file for Zerto Virtual Manager. Within the app, it could prompt you to install and perform the installation from within the application. Generally, it's relatively easy to use, but it gets a little complex when customers have special network requirements and need to customize how long they want the save points to be retained. We need to work with the storage team on the backend to see what makes the most sense for the client."
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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