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.
"It is a very stable solution...I was involved in VMware SRM's deployment phase two years ago, and it was an easy process."
"The product is evolving and the vendor is committed to change."
"The replication is a key feature."
"The most valuable features are the disaster recovery and testing."
"The solution is consistent."
"VMware SRM's most valuable features are its convenience and its use of stretched clusters."
"It is easy to implement for my clients."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can independently run the disaster recovery without disturbing the production instances."
"Zerto is low maintenance, so I can set it and forget it. It has a great process and an excellent solution."
"Zerto helped our organization meet compliance requirements by ensuring data protection and recovery strategies align with our regulatory standards."
"I like the fact that Zerto is target agnostic. It doesn't care what type of storage it writes to. The journaling is also excellent. You can easily and quickly restore to seconds before an event. The immutable data copies feature is one reason we adopted Zerto. That's one of its selling points."
"The most valuable tool is the dashboard, which allows us to immediately check the DLP status, replication data, and all other data needed to have cleaner and immediate control of the situation."
"Files can also be extracted from the VMDK at the remote site even when the VM is off."
"It is pretty easy to use. The interface is intuitive and easy to use. Once you set it up, it just works. So, it is great."
"Zerto is fast to restore our mission-critical servers when needed."
"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."
"The two vCenters have to be synchronized, which sometimes gives us problems because Keberos does not tolerate more than five minutes in time difference."
"Technical support can take some time to respond."
"VMware SRM lacks certain functions that other platforms have, such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles."
"VMware SRM needs to improve its pricing."
"What I think can be improved is the data replication aspect."
"The administration guides can be complicated and difficult to use, so it would be helpful if it was made easier."
"You need a lot of knowledge to work with the interface because it is not really easy to use, and it would be great if the dashboard were simplified."
"In general, the drawbacks of VMware SRM, where improvements can be made, stem from the fact that it is an expensive and complex product."
"I would like to see some improvements with APIs going into the cloud so that they can more natively orchestrate the migration point-to-point without special hands-on configuration. Azure does some of that natively by having an agent on the VM, but Zerto could improve on its APIs into Azure or Google so that spinning up works more natively in that environment. It would make things smoother."
"The technical support is hit or miss."
"For what we got it for, it does it great. I use a different solution for my disk-to-disk local backups to where I can have a local backup of files. I don't think Zerto does that well to where it keeps a memory of the files that are there. Basically, when something is deleted on Zerto, it gets deleted on the replicated version. So, some sort of snapshotting or something where I could have backups at different points in time of files would be a really helpful tool."
"I had a couple of questions after deployment, but nothing major, about a couple of ways I could tweak it."
"If I have to reboot a virtual machine host, I have issues with Zerto catching up afterward. That's about the only thing I would say needs improvement. Sometimes, when I have to do maintenance, Zerto takes a little bit to catch up. That's understandable."
"One improvement that could make it easier would be to have an easier way to track journal usage and a little bit more training around journal sizing. I've done all the training and the journal is still a gray area. There is confusion surrounding how it's billed and how we should bill clients. It would be easier if it had billing suggestions or billing best practices for our clients to make sure that we're not leaving money on the table."
"They could iron out the licensing aspect of it, so we might be a bit quicker when implementing and starting to use it."
"We did look at the long-term retention backup feature of Zerto a few years ago, and at that time, it was limited. I can't say what it is right now, but at the time, its functionality was limited in terms of basically where we could save it and how we could save it. Offsite air gapping our backups is important to us to help protect against ransomware, and at the time, it couldn't do that. That would be one area that would be important before we consider using the long-term retention again. I haven't looked at it recently, and they may have addressed this in the meantime, but if not, this would be an area of improvement."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 73 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 236 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.
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