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.
"In terms of recovery, if you have a test job script, you can put it on top of it. You can create custom steps so that it will be more granular. It will be an easy, one click solution when it comes to the recovery application."
"I would rate the ease of setting up and configuring my recovery plan in VMware SRM, a ten out of ten, with ten being the easiest."
"Our systems fail over using SRM. So, we do a big bang DR, which is biannual, and we fail over our fairly massive Epic electronic health record (EHR) and our core applications. It takes us about 30 minutes to fail over using SRM, which is pretty good. In most hospitals that have Epic installed, Epic does the audit to make sure that we can fail over if something were to happen. Normally, sites will have a DR solution specific to the EHR, but right now, our pain point is the third-party tier-one clinical applications."
"It has a good and effective user interface."
"The installation and initial setup are straightforward."
"Virtual Machine Recovery during DR situation, with automation and easy to use menus and options."
"We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly."
"The most valuable features are the continuous streaming, that it takes very little CPU usage — it doesn't affect production — and the recovery time is very short."
"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."
"Some of the most valuable features are the synchronous replication and migration with RDMs. I really like the conversion of RDM VMs for migration."
"It is convenient to use because the API allows for seamless integration when performing our day-to-day operations."
"The low RPO times of about four to eight seconds are very nice and very valuable to us."
"The most valuable features are the single pane of glass and the reduction in time it takes for our systems engineering team to manage the platform."
"The continuation to the public cloud has been especially helpful where I can pretty much work with things like hosts and clusters as part of the data center."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to recover critical systems, such as public safety, within a few minutes. In addition, the RPO is six seconds of data loss, tops."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"The interface is not easy to use and can be made more user-friendly."
"Technical support can take some time to respond."
"The two vCenters have to be synchronized, which sometimes gives us problems because Keberos does not tolerate more than five minutes in time difference."
"The user experience could be more friendly."
"An improvement for SRM would be better interface compatibility with other products."
"The solution is on the expensive side."
"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."
"We would like the LTR function to be able to retain the past 12 months."
"The setup process is time-consuming."
"It would be nice if Zerto offered OVFs, which are custom-built VMs that you can install on your virtualized environment. At the moment, I have the Zerto sitting on two custom-built Windows servers, which creates a lot of overhead. I'm waiting for them to create an OVF file, which is a built and hardened version of their Zerto server that I can just install wherever with a couple of mouse clicks."
"I'm not sure if it has throttling, meaning, what's going over the wire and how we can throttle that to reduce the amount of data that's going across the bandwidth. I can't remember if that's something that's in this product. It might be in the more recent version."
"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."
"Zerto could be considered as a backup product but this is not true. So if we could consolidate and use Zerto for disaster recovery as well as everyday backup and restore for situations where we need to recover something, that would be helpful. Anyway, we think that Zerto will win with no competition in the Disaster Recovery process, so we stay focused on this. Now we are testing version 10 which include real-time ransomware detection, a new Cyber Resilience Vault and enhanced cloud capabilities and security: we expect more from these features for superior hybrid cloud security."
"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."
"They could iron out the licensing aspect of it, so we might be a bit quicker when implementing and starting to use it."
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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