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.
"It is a stable solution...The solution's technical support is excellent."
"The solution is consistent."
"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery testing."
"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 replication is the solution's most valuable feature. If we have some issues on the VM in the main site we can migrate it to another site automatically."
"The stability of SRM has been excellent. It gets a nine-out-of-ten."
"The solution can be deployed in a couple of hours."
"It is easy to implement for my clients."
"The test features have been really good for us. Our DR testing goes very quickly and easily now for all our stuff with Zerto. We have our priority recovery process, where we cover our databases for our app servers and web servers. All our teams pretty much get their VMs very quickly. The RPOs are very low."
"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 ability to test which virtual machines can be failed over to our DR site without interruption of our production environment."
"The ease of use is one of the most valuable features when it comes to making changes and configuring. It's very easy to set up and configure. It's a great product."
"Zerto has helped reduce our organization's DR testing to seconds to minutes. We have been able to save probably close to 200 hours a year."
"It is cost-effective and stable. It protects virtual machines, and there is a fast recovery time."
"The replication and recovery features are the most valuable... On two occasions, other departments in our organization reported issues with specific virtual machines. We used the checkpoint feature of the Zerto to enable the recovery of those machines to a point that was a few minutes prior to the problem."
"We don't have to spend a whole lot of time worrying about DR and whether or not we are covered. Zerto just works. As it is replicating, we don't need to spend a whole lot of time with it. That is a huge benefit as far as daily management."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"The version we are currently using is not the latest and greatest but it has buggy behavior in some browsers."
"SRM may hit some OS issues related to IP changes, but they are usually OS related, especially in the 2008 realm."
"The interface is not easy to use and can be made more user-friendly."
"One thing which is lacking from the SRM is reporting."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"The solution must provide better integration with third-party vendors."
"In my opinion, the integration with Peer Persistent Storage could be improved."
"For special situations, there are options within advanced settings. You don't have to dig too far for them, but they're not quite as straightforward."
"I would like to see a separate product offer for performing backups, although I think that this is something that they are expecting to release in the next version."
"There is a need to allow the source vCenter Inventory to be imported with a single click."
"The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited."
"The licensing is confusing and complicated."
"They definitely have room for improvement in a couple of areas. One is role-based access control. Right now, they don't have an identity source so they use the identity of the vCenter or the VMM. If they connected to an identity source like Active Directory and allowed for granular roles and permissions, that would be an improvement."
"Right now, our production environment runs on-premises, and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. However, our development runs on that hardware. In the case of a DR event, we would need to shut down development and bring up our secondary copy of production. We're hoping that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that."
"In future releases, doing backups of the environment we need to be able to do hot backups of the database."
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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