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."
"VMware SRM is very effective between two sites with identical twin storage, you can have synchronization between the two sites."
"The most valuable features are the disaster recovery and testing."
"Its capability to schedule, write and configure the recovery and scheduled steps, such that you don't have to come in and start manually trying to recover the entire machine. You just push a button to recover the VMware and everything is done."
"The UI is very user-friendly and testing is easy."
"Combined with RecoverPoint, it offers zero RPO and zero RTO."
"It's easy to use and the interface is quite simple."
"VMware's tech support gets a nine-out-of-ten. They are responsive and get you a useful reply."
"I've been fortunate enough not to need to rely on Zerto in an actual disaster, but we do testing every year. Sometimes, it's multiple times annually or at the year's end. It takes the recovery workflow, which would normally take a lot of planning, and reduces that to just a few minutes."
"I like that the failover is simple and that it's a stable platform. It makes it easy for us to do failovers in the event that we have an issue. It also makes it easier to do test failovers because we can test it prior to actually doing a real failover. This means that we can pull things back or commit them over on the other side. Zerto streamlines the process instead of having to have a whole team of people who are dedicated to disaster recovery."
"The replication works really well. We perform multiple tests a month and annual tests for our tier-one and many of our tier-two apps... Migrating systems as a failover rollback or a system move are two of the functions that I like the most."
"A new feature is the One-To-Many VPG allowing a VM to be replicated at up to three different locations, including local."
"Zerto's user-friendliness is valuable."
"The real-time replication of data is the most valuable feature. It is a vast improvement in scheduled daily backups. Real-time data is streamed to the offsite data center, which allows us to restore our mission-critical applications up to 10 seconds from when the last changes were made in our system. If we enter a sales order or enter any kind of information in our ERP application it is replicated within 10 seconds to the offsite location."
"We can spin up our environment in DR without affecting production, which is probably the biggest feature for us. We have the ability to do passive testing. We can even test scenarios, such as installing software or changing software. We can make modifications without affecting our production environment. So, the test functionality of being able to test the failover solution and being able to bring up our virtual machines in a test mode is the biggest benefit."
"We own another solution called VMware Site Recovery Manager, SRM. We have licenses for our entire environment and we still decided not to use it. That's how big the difference was in the experience that Zerto provides."
"The solution could improve by removing some of the limitations we have been facing. There could be better integrated."
"The product's stability could be better."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"The solution currently has a five-minute RPO, meaning if the VM goes down we can lose up to five minutes of data which is a big deal when it relates to database replication."
"VMware SRM's platform agnostics should support on-cloud usage as well."
"An improvement for SRM would be better interface compatibility with other products."
"In general, the drawbacks of VMware SRM, where improvements can be made, stem from the fact that it is an expensive and complex product."
"The product's dashboard is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"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."
"Another thing that would help would be a recommender, or some type of tool that says, 'Hey, you're not conforming to best practices.' It would do a conformance or compliance check to tell you if your VPGs are set up according to best practices and whether your Zerto clusters are set up optimally. It would see if you have HA enabled and whether your alerting is turned on."
"I would like Zerto to enhance the continuous backup aspect."
"It would be difficult to do, but I would love it if Zerto handled some of the scripting and things necessary to do a recovery. For example, it would be helpful if the solution could update the DNS to point to a new location. It would be nice to automate some of those tasks that you have to do to recover a VM and they were kinda out-of-the-box point-and-click things rather than things that required you to write a script."
"The monitoring and alerting functionality need to be improved."
"The full site recovery is not up to SRM standards."
"We wanted to shut down the dev environment to focus on the prod environment. We couldn't find any option in Zerto to do that."
"I want to have an OVF or some local deployment where I can deploy the ZVRA rather than having to push it from the console. Some of our smaller remote sites have relatively poor bandwidth, and they can't keep up with the constant deployment stream from our center console, meaning we have to find some creative hours to get around the bandwidth bottlenecks. If I could push out a small install file, install it locally, and then reach back to the console, that would be excellent."
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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