VMware Site Recovery Manager vs. Zerto on IBM Cloud

SRM is a must-have tool if your business requires you to failover your VMs to a disaster recovery site and provide valid testing and real-time numbers. Our VP office is always amazed at how easily we are able to satisfy our annual testing and show actual results with time stamps and the sequence of each VM that is up and running. SRM may not be needed in a very small business that does not have the capacity nor the need to have their infrastructure off site in a form of a disaster recovery site.

Incentivized

If the environment is fully IBM cloud-based with simple infra components like the SQL servers, standard VMs or applications with short recovery time objectives. This cost-effective solution can save in implementing rather than an expensive DR mechanism or tool to support the overall recovery strategy. If you have complex environments where mission-critical apps like Oracle Databases are running in a cluster mode and features like data guard is used this option would not be a good choice due to complexity.

Incentivized

• Easy to build a recovery plan
• Easy to test recovery plans
• Works with storage based replication or non storage based replication

• Ease of setup and upgrade. Installation and configuration was a breeze and can get you protected in just minutes without having to set up additional hardware.
• Consolidated billing of the IBM infrastructure and Zerto licensing. One bill to pay monthly.
• Ease of support access. Contacting IBM Cloud support is quick and easy and they can quickly involve Zerto support if needed.

Incentivized

• I am not very pleased with the overall licensing cost. It's pretty expensive. Especially if you have a small number of VMs, you are paying a lot.
• We had a little struggle getting our support tickets resolved by VMWare support.

Incentivized

• Enable the ability to use IBM Cloud Object Storage as a target for Zerto's long-term retention feature.
• Easier access to the underlying VMware infrastructure would be nice. Right now we have to connect to IBM's VPN and use other tools to do some infrastructure management tasks.
• More insight into the IBM-side VMware environment that we replicate to (i.e. ability to see available IPs, etc). Most of that is managed by IBM.

Incentivized

- easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster

Incentivized

VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.

Incentivized

Sometimes we have to struggle explaining the problem and getting it resolved on priority. The overall quality of support team is not as good as it used to be in past.

Incentivized

Veeam Backup & Replication is slower than VMWare SRM and doesn't suits our RTO (Recovery Time Objective).

Incentivized

We had prior experience with Zerto and we were very happy with how it worked. Rubrik is also a very good product, but we wanted to go with the solution we were most familiar with. Zerto combined with IBM Cloud is a reliable combo that we feel works together well in addressing what we are trying to accomplish.

Incentivized

• The biggest positive is that we have a data recovery solution that we can test and verify in a live condition. Prior to this we were only hoping we could recover from a disaster.
• We've been only running for 4 months and haven't had to use SRM.

Incentivized

• Overall, it's a very effective solution both from a cost and operational standpoint. We now do DR tests once a quarter rather than once every 6 months.

Incentivized