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 UI is very user-friendly and testing is easy."
"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."
"It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"The solution runs well in the background, just in case we need it."
"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."
"Its capability to schedule, write and configure the recovery and scheduled steps, such that you don't have to come in and start manually trying to recover the entire machine. You just push a button to recover the VMware and everything is done."
"It's easy to use and the interface is quite simple."
"We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable."
"It is cost-effective and stable. It protects virtual machines, and there is a fast recovery time."
"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."
"The ease of failover and test environments has proven invaluable."
"The recovery was pretty seamless. It took about a minute for it to kick over when we did our testing. So, it wasn't a long downtime."
"The ability to have a RPO of seconds has enabled us to restore data to just before an incident has occurred, which certainly saves a lot of time and money."
"Moving the VPGs from one location to another is a valuable feature. You just click on it and move it and it's done."
"The near-synchronous replication is key. That has allowed us to provide the low RPOs that we promise. For key systems, that has been the deciding factor."
"The ease of setting up replication, the speed, and the ease with which I can fail over and fail back are all excellent aspects of the solution."
"Technical support can take some time to respond."
"VMware SRM's platform agnostics should support on-cloud usage as well."
"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."
"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."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"The price, in general, could be lower."
"VMware SRM lacks certain functions that other platforms have, such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles."
"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."
"Increased granularity in how long to keep the journal would be nice."
"We would like the LTR function to be able to retain the past 12 months."
"Zerto needs to improve its documentation."
"The replication layer can probably be improved."
"The email alerts can be excessive, so better control over frequency or resolution may be a worthwhile improvement."
"The onset of configuring an environment in the cloud is difficult and could be easier to do."
"They just came out with improvements for ransomware protection last week. I haven't used them yet but, overall, security and preventing ransomware is really a hot topic these days. I would like to see it detect when the ransomware occurs and provide more information on it."
"When I have a technical question, it sometimes takes a while for tech support to respond."
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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