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 stability of SRM has been excellent. It gets a nine-out-of-ten."
"I like how VMware SRM is able to automate and orchestrate disaster recovery."
"The solution runs well in the background, just in case we need it."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of operations."
"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery testing."
"It's very reliable. The solution is stable."
"VMware SRM is very effective between two sites with identical twin storage, you can have synchronization between the two sites."
"VMware SRM's most valuable features are its convenience and its use of stretched clusters."
"The instant recovery at DR locations is the most valuable feature. We're required to do periodic DR tests of critical databases, including Oracle and Microsoft SQL. We have recovery point objectives set for specific databases and we need to be able to achieve them. Zerto helps solve that business problem."
"Zerto's ease of use is outstanding; it's easy to set up and has a clear interface and menus. The reporting, analytics, and online monitoring are also excellent."
"In our DR testing, Zerto allows us to go work on other things while it takes care of everything. That's valuable because we know that we can still hit all of our SLAs in a real disaster."
"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."
"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 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."
"It enables protection of a virtual workload to be done by the app, whether single or multi-tiered, with a boot time scheduler. It is pretty awesome."
"The replication works really well. We perform multiple tests a month and annual tests for our tier-one and many of our tier-two apps... Migrating systems as a failover rollback or a system move are two of the functions that I like the most."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"If you have a failover case, you need to work on it manually. It would be helpful if this could be automated. It would simplify things."
"We have had an issue when some customers have traditional designs and sites. For example, on one another site, they are using hyper-converged, using VMware, or Nutanix. We have a problem with the synchronization between the storage for site to site. This is the main issue. We are adding some other tools to support the synchronization to allow the movement of the workload from site to site easily."
"SRM has to be installed on two separate data centers, so both have to be coordinated very well, which becomes complicated when configuring the software for disaster recovery."
"The technical support is not very good and needs to make an effort to improve."
"The solution could improve by removing some of the limitations we have been facing. There could be better integrated."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"The two vCenters have to be synchronized, which sometimes gives us problems because Keberos does not tolerate more than five minutes in time difference."
"The alerting doesn't quite give you the information about what exactly is going on when an issue comes up. We do get alerts inside of our vCenter, but it doesn't quite give you accurate information inside the plugin to be able to tell us what's going on without having to go into the actual Zerto application and figuring out what's causing the issue."
"The only issue that I observed was that depending on the number of virtual machines that are being replicated, you will have to provision the appropriate bandwidth for the link that the replicated systems will traverse."
"It would also be nice if you could update without having to download a new installation file for Zerto Virtual Manager. Within the app, it could prompt you to install and perform the installation from within the application. Generally, it's relatively easy to use, but it gets a little complex when customers have special network requirements and need to customize how long they want the save points to be retained. We need to work with the storage team on the backend to see what makes the most sense for the client."
"The backup end of this solution could be improved. We tried using it as a full backup solution and it took way too long to complete at least one backup."
"I have had problems with vRAs. When I am trying to restart a host, sometimes the vRAs will hang. I would like it if they wouldn't migrate off or shut themselves down, then I have to manually work with it a lot of the time."
"From the relationship standpoint, we have never had a local rep in South Bend, Indiana. It has always been somebody in Boston, and there is not a lot of communication. That is one of the big things. We would like help driving the business and talking to our sales people as well as more involvement from them. We could really utilize it more, drawing more customers in, but we need help with that."
"This solution could be improved if it met all the requirements that we look for including supporting multiple operating systems. We would prefer to use one solution for DR and backup."
"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."
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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