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 solution is strong when it comes to protection and analytics, with the latter being added later on."
"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."
"VMware is one of the best products in the industry when it comes to virtualization."
"The stability of SRM has been excellent. It gets a nine-out-of-ten."
"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."
"We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable."
"If you want to do failover, it works without any problem."
"It's very reliable. The solution is stable."
"Failing over the VM without removing/touching the production VM from inventory is also an important feature."
"We are doing continuous data protection. It works flawlessly. Our recovery points are measured in seconds. We have all these "baby snapshots" throughout the course of the day, so we can roll a VM back to any point in time, spin it up, and away we go. We're actively using that. It works great."
"The way we can use checkpoints from each VM to restore them is an excellent feature, and the replication is great."
"It works very well in terms of it providing continuous data protection. It does what it says it is going to do. We have been using it for several years, and once or twice, we had to recover a machine or files. It didn't have any problems in doing what it is supposed to be doing."
"If we had to deal with a ransomware event, Zerto would be one of the first things I would use, because it is going to be the fastest to restore data to a certain point. If there were a fire in our building, Zerto would be a big thing too, because we would shut down everything that's in our building. In most cases, Zerto is definitely one of the front lines. It's definitely going to be one of our prevalent DRBC layers of protection."
"The most valuable feature of Zerto is its overall flexibility, where it can be used for standard DR or you can also use it for server migrations, data center consolidations, etc."
"We relocated all our virtual machines from Belgium to Budapest, Hungary. I am not sure how we would have done it without Zerto, because we were able to keep the data in sync. We would have needed to have a lot more expensive storage products online at the time that could have kept that replication. From what I have seen from other methods, that would have required a much higher amount of bandwidth as well, then the cost would have been extreme. The mechanisms available to us with a storage space replication would have been more labor-intensive and prone to error. It was much easier and more successful with Zerto than other ways at our disposal."
"The DR - Disaster Recovery - is the main selling point."
"Timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas. When this happens, we encounter errors."
"There are many functionality problems with the product currently. It is also slow and unstable."
"The primary site lacks adequate equipment, such as power backup and cooling, which can lead to downtime during issues like power outages or overheating."
"VMware SRM lacks certain functions that other platforms have, such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles."
"The technical support is not quick enough to respond when a user tries to contact them."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"I would like to see better integration with other storage solutions. I would hope to see that within the next two or three years."
"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."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"Zerto is too reliant on VMware's vCenter. It's tough to upgrade, move, or do anything related to virtual servers with vCenter."
"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."
"With secure boot enabled, which is the case for newer systems, it is not easy to rotate passwords and we would have to reinstall the DRAs."
"Zerto is solid. However, they are working on a cloud workload protection and protecting virtual workloads to more than one site."
"Improvements in stability would be welcome; there are some software bugs that can affect RPOs. We want more of a guarantee that we won't lose any of our backups, even in the event of a disaster."
"The only thing I really don't like about Zerto is that the ZVM has to be a Windows server. I can spin up any OBA template whenever I want to, but if it has an OS that's tied to it, then I have to involve the OS team from my company. That drives me crazy."
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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