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."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with our Nutanix environment."
"VMware SRM is very effective between two sites with identical twin storage, you can have synchronization between the two sites."
"The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly."
"Testing failover capabilities."
"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."
"VMware SRM's most valuable features are its convenience and its use of stretched clusters."
"It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"From a management perspective, one of the biggest benefits is to see the excitement of your engineers having a tool that truly enables them, really making their lives easier. That is something that I love. When we came out of the PoC, their eyes were just wide with excitement of what was possible now."
"VMware VM replication over narrow WAN bandwidth."
"We are in the process of switching over our production data center and Zerto has been a true time-saver that has cost us zero downtime."
"In terms of the most valuable features, having the failover tests where you can see where your actual RTO and RPO would be is really nice, especially for the management level. I really liked the ease of when I need to do a file or folder restore off the cuff. Usually, it takes me less than five minutes to do it, including the mounting of the actual image. That was one thing with Unitrends, it was a similar process but if that backup had aged off of the system, then you had to go to the archive and you find the right disks, load them in, and then actually mount the image."
"A new feature is the One-To-Many VPG allowing a VM to be replicated at up to three different locations, including local."
"Zerto provides our customers with the ability to continue work, even if something happens to their office or data center."
"It has enabled DR protection for virtual appliances with minimal administrator time."
"The disaster recovery features are the best I've found."
"This product is not appropriate for those moving to a broader cloud footprint."
"The back sites sometimes are very, very complicated."
"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."
"The product's stability could be better."
"One thing which is lacking from the SRM is reporting."
"The interface is not easy to use and can be made more user-friendly."
"The initial setup of VMware SRM isn't straightforward because many customizations are required since it helps in the recovery of your IT environment."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"The backup functions are in need of improvement."
"The number-one area in which they need to improve their product is what I would call "automatic self-healing." This is related to running them at scale... We have 1,000 VRAs and if any one of their VRAs has a problem, goes offline, all of the customer protection groups and all of the customers that are tied to that VRA are not replicating at all. That means the RPO is slipping until somebody makes a manual effort to fix the issue. It has become a full-time job at my company for somebody to keep Zerto running all the time, everywhere, and to keep all the customers up and going."
"I had to have my colleague contact technical support because we had an issue where VMs in VMware were getting blocked, and we weren't able to delete them."
"We're not fully satisfied with the support team."
"From the technical side, there can be a little bit more PowerShell integration. I know it leverages APIs, but people still use PowerShell. Some people would rather use PowerShell if that is an option."
"The licensing is confusing and complicated."
"I wish Zerto had better file restoration capabilities. We have not been able to use that because of the limitations of Zerto's de-duplication technology."
"I haven't been a super big fan of the support area. The support could really be better in terms of responsiveness. I've had some issues that took two or three days to get resolved. Once I got to the right person, they were resolved quickly, but it took a while to get to that person."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 71 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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