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 most valuable feature is the simplicity of operations."
"It is easy to implement for my clients."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the integration part, along with the subsequent hardware."
"If you want to do failover, it works without any problem."
"The replication is a key feature."
"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."
"The solution helps to improve business continuity processes. Its automatic failover and failback policies have been wonderful."
"The most valuable feature of VMware SRM is its integration with the VMware platform."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the live migration."
"In terms of continuous data protection, it's the best product that we've found that does this. It's not snapshot-based. It's continuous, so there are no specific points in time we have to worry about recovering to or from. It's pretty much any time, as long as it's within our replication window."
"The most valuable tool is the dashboard, which allows us to immediately check the DLP status, replication data, and all other data needed to have cleaner and immediate control of the situation."
"It reduced the backup recovery time of our main backup solution by several hours. It's reduced our time because before we have to build a system and restore the data, we install the application and restore the data that took us at least a good 24 hours to do that. And now it's really minutes for us to recover our backup solution."
"The solution's most valuable aspect is allowing a failover from our remote sites to our data center. Our remote sites have failed several times, and on each occasion, we were able to bring a plant back online within 30 minutes, even though the hardware repair took many days."
"I like the ease of recovery and backup the most."
"Real-time replication is a valuable feature, ensuring that changes made to the production site are immediately reflected at the recovery site."
"Files can also be extracted from the VMDK at the remote site even when the VM is off."
"The user experience could be more friendly."
"There are many functionality problems with the product currently. It is also slow and unstable."
"It would be better if we could get more reporting features in VMware SRM."
"I would like to see this solution be more scalable."
"You cannot use VMware SRM in conjunction with storage replication software."
"Cost is definitely an area where the product could be improved."
"The configuration process could be improved."
"VMware SRM lacks certain functions that other platforms have, such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles."
"One improvement that could make it easier would be to have an easier way to track journal usage and a little bit more training around journal sizing. I've done all the training and the journal is still a gray area. There is confusion surrounding how it's billed and how we should bill clients. It would be easier if it had billing suggestions or billing best practices for our clients to make sure that we're not leaving money on the table."
"The post-configuration part could be improved. For example, it would be super helpful to have the ability to modify DNS. Once the migration is done, we want to do some more modifications to the endpoint."
"Overall, Zerto is doing a very good job. We have experienced a few downtimes on networking. Most of the time, they come up with a solution immediately to sort out any challenge that may affect data flow or data migration. It does not happen frequently. We might experience it once in two months, but when we face any downtime, it does not impact the data."
"There's one feature that SRM had that Zerto doesn't have, and it's one that we've been asking for. With the orchestration part of the failover, with our DR and our primary sites, the IP addresses are almost identical. The only difference is one octet. With SRM, we could say during a failover change. With Zerto, we keep hearing that it's coming, but we haven't received it yet. It's a feature that would be very beneficial. It would reduce the time a little bit more."
"Even though Zerto is for disaster recovery, it would be nice if it can also make backups."
"Zerto could add text alerts if there are critical problems and alerts if changes affect our replication."
"You can create a VPG and put anywhere from one to 17 servers in that group. We build them one by one. If something changes in VMware, it would be nice to be able to go in and change that VPG, having it update without messing up. When you change them now, it only applies to the copies from the points when you changed it. I wish it would purge that older data from the past. Right now, we have to build a new VPG, which is not a big deal as it is just a few screens."
"I would like them to add a VM host replication option. Being able to replicate host configuration between sites would be a huge benefit."
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.
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