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 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."
"It is a stable solution...The solution's technical support is excellent."
"The UI is very user-friendly and testing is easy."
"Testing failover capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly."
"The product is evolving and the vendor is committed to change."
"VMware SRM replicates the VM from one site to another, and it helps us orchestrate the powering of VMs and DR when the DC goes down."
"We've never had any major headaches with the virtual-protection groups. They seem to work exactly as they should. If there's ever an issue with replication, we know right away, so it's all been very reliable."
"For most use cases, the failover time is a handful of minutes, if that. A single user can run the system."
"Zerto provides our customers with the ability to continue work, even if something happens to their office or data center."
"For us, the most valuable features are the quick upload time and how the sync works... We have VMware SRM and Veeam, and they have been pretty slow and sluggish."
"Since the log files are continuously transmitted, the granularity of restores is amazing."
"The replication for DR is really good, and the test failover within the application is really solid, along with the ability to manipulate RDMs or remove them."
"The stability is great; there's very little downtime. I don't have to worry that there will be a surprise update to one of the ZVRAs or the host that I have to contend with. We're given plenty of notice to plan ahead for an update. As far as losing service and downtime, we haven't had that happen."
"When we use our VMware environment, sometimes the HP hardware is not compatible, and we start to lose data. I like that we can restore our whole application and public-facing system through Zerto."
"VMware SRM lacks certain functions that other platforms have, such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles."
"In general, the drawbacks of VMware SRM, where improvements can be made, stem from the fact that it is an expensive and complex product."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"The solution could improve by removing some of the limitations we have been facing. There could be better integrated."
"In my opinion, the integration with Peer Persistent Storage could be improved."
"The configuration process could be improved."
"Technical support can take some time to respond."
"There needs to be better stability during heavy capacity in future releases."
"The only complaint is that if I remove a host from a cluster, it does not like that. If I move and put the host in maintenance mode to fix it, and vRA is down, Zerto does not like it. Zerto should figure out that this host has an issue and it went down. Zerto should then let me upload that vRA information to another vRA."
"We have had issues with licensing, where the license we've been given by Zerto support doesn't include VSS replication, which was a pain at the time."
"It would be advantageous if Zerto had plugins for Infoblox, Cisco, or load balancers, as this would enable us to better manage those records."
"We had a situation where we had to relicense VMs once they were moved over. We later found out that that feature is built-in, but it's not easy to find. The way it's done is that you have to go to the target site to turn it on. If that were explained a little bit better up front, that would be helpful."
"The setup process is time-consuming."
"Their data backup and restore have some ways to go."
"Zerto could improve its reporting capabilities."
"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."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 69 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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