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."
"It's very reliable. The solution is stable."
"Combined with RecoverPoint, it offers zero RPO and zero RTO."
"It has a good and effective user interface."
"We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable."
"Automated recovery is one good feature, SRM also offers simplified management. It has a centralized interface for configuring, testing, and executing disaster recovery plans across multiple sites. This means management from a single point, even for many sites."
"The solution helps to improve business continuity processes. Its automatic failover and failback policies have been wonderful."
"The product is evolving and the vendor is committed to change."
"The ability to test which virtual machines can be failed over to our DR site without interruption of our production environment."
"We've seen a massive benefit from using Zerto in terms of time savings and consistency. You see a consistent outcome every time you do the conversions. We're moving from one platform to another, but the payloads in what we're moving are different. We see consistent delivery."
"The low RPO times of about four to eight seconds are very nice and very valuable to us."
"Zerto is low maintenance, so I can set it and forget it. It has a great process and an excellent solution."
"The way we can use checkpoints from each VM to restore them is an excellent feature, and the replication is great."
"We have seen ROI. The biggest way that we have seen it is in avoided downtime. We have had outages before, and we count downtime in terms of dollars spent. We have cut that down so dramatically, which provides us a very quick ROI. We have drastically reduced the amount of time it takes us to recover workloads, from an average of two hours to an average of 10 minutes."
"Consistency Groups: If you replicate groups of VMs, then during failover, all of the VMs in groups are failed over to the exact same point in time."
"We had a disaster recovery four or five years ago. I can't remember what happened, but I believe something crashed in our data center, like a power outage. We did a failover of our network using Zerto from production to disaster recovery. We successfully completed the failover process in three or four hours without issue. The data was current, and the application owners could access their data and continue working while the issue was resolved."
"The price, in general, could be lower."
"Cost is definitely an area where the product could 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 solution must provide better integration with third-party vendors."
"The interface is not easy to use and can be made more user-friendly."
"The biggest issue for us is that this product does not have any demo for customers."
"Currently, there is a limitation of consolidating only 15 sites per SRM."
"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 syncing of the replication needs improvement. My experience has been that, every once in a while, when you go to do a failover, it tells you it's not syncing. Then you have to troubleshoot and figure out why it's not fully synced up."
"The full site recovery is not up to SRM standards."
"Increased granularity in how long to keep the journal would be nice."
"I had a couple of questions after deployment, but nothing major, about a couple of ways I could tweak it."
"It needs more documentation and automation features. I would like more documentation on designing an environment and network operations. On the automation side, I would like automation to clean up the environment in cases of a failed DR effort. An API interface to perform the DR exercise would also be nice."
"For special situations, there are options within advanced settings. You don't have to dig too far for them, but they're not quite as straightforward."
"It would be nice if we were able to purchase single licenses for Zerto. As it is now, scaling requires that we purchase a multi-pack."
"The only complaint is that if I remove a host from a cluster, it does not like that. If I move and put the host in maintenance mode to fix it, and vRA is down, Zerto does not like it. Zerto should figure out that this host has an issue and it went down. Zerto should then let me upload that vRA information to another vRA."
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, Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Rubrik, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and Azure Site Recovery. See our VMware SRM vs. Zerto report.
See our list of best Disaster Recovery (DR) Software vendors.
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