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 resiliency, the most valuable aspect of SRM has been its effectiveness."
"It is a very stable solution...I was involved in VMware SRM's deployment phase two years ago, and it was an easy process."
"Combined with RecoverPoint, it offers zero RPO and zero RTO."
"If you want to do failover, it works without any problem."
"We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable."
"Virtual Machine Recovery during DR situation, with automation and easy to use menus and options."
"The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly."
"The product functionality is fairly high-quality."
"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."
"I found VM level replication and being able to group the VM levels to be valuable. I like not having to worry about whether a particular VM is in the right storage group; some of those sorts of things would trip us up previously."
"There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better."
"We can recover both systems on-premises and in the public cloud."
"The quickness and efficiency of creating snapshots, on a real-time basis, is one of the most valuable features. Whenever changes are made on a server, Zerto starts taking snapshots right away and replicating them to the DR site. It's very effective and very quick."
"We can failover to an isolated environment and validate the application without impacting the production environment. We can do more testing in a non-impactful way..."
"The most valuable features of this solution is the ease of use. In the event of a disaster, you don't need a technical person to actually run the software. You can bring anybody in, with the right instructions and credentials, and they can run the solution."
"The simplicity of use is valuable. It is easy. We just click Failover and do it. It is pretty straightforward. If someone wants to do a test failover, they log in to the console and do a test failover"
"The technical support is not quick enough to respond when a user tries to contact them."
"The price, in general, could be lower."
"Timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas. When this happens, we encounter errors."
"The version we are currently using is not the latest and greatest but it has buggy behavior in some browsers."
"The initial setup of VMware SRM isn't straightforward because many customizations are required since it helps in the recovery of your IT environment."
"In my opinion, the integration with Peer Persistent Storage could be improved."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"It has a lot of dependencies on VMware infrastructure, and testing can be complex. Testing often requires extensive approval at the organizational level."
"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."
"I would like to see some graphical improvements in Zerto's interface. There's an option to export a list of all of our servers, but the information isn't presented the way we want. We want it in a specified sequence broken down by region, etc. We can't manipulate the data when we export it. Maybe they could change it to look more like an Excel sheet, and we can customize the graphics and data. We suggested these improvements to Zerto through their portal."
"I would like them to add a VM host replication option. Being able to replicate host configuration between sites would be a huge benefit."
"Some of the features need improvement. One would be, as you're creating a Move group or a VPG, as they call it, it should either autosave or have the ability so that you can save it for coming back to later because if the setup times out, you lose all your work. That would be a nice improvement to have."
"I wouldn't mind seeing Zerto sold at a cheaper price point, although the cost is comparable to VMware SRM."
"With the VPG (virtual protected group) it would be nice if you could pick individuals in the grouping instead of having to failover the whole group."
"If the log was more detailed and more user-friendly, we wouldn't have to make the calls to the support to try and figure out where the problem lies."
"It has some quirks. We have quirks with appliances. Some things don't really work as expected, but it is minor."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 72 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, Commvault Cloud, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines 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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