VMware Cloud Director vs. Zerto on IBM Cloud

For a CSP it's the best choice. For internal uses, even in presence of different business units, it's not so easy and flexible to manage. It assures a high level of multitenancy, often not needed for internal purposes. But it could be used in this case, just not created for these purposes. Network management is great.

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

• Manages multi-tenancy very well. You can setup resource pools of compute, network, and storage that are independent of each other.
• Easy to create and manage multiple environments.
• Has lease management technology and can easily set leases and expire them based on pre-configured time frames.

Incentivized

• 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

• Logging, there is a lot of logging but is not always clear where to look for the right logging.
• The syncing of policy, you can't see if or what he did/didn't sync and the status of it.
• More integrations with VMware product (click like Availability)

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

Another option was own scripting or maintaining the end users in the backend (vcenter). This costs to much time to maintain (scripting) and has a big change of a Security breach. It was not an option for us either way.

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

• vCloud Director requires less IT administration. For example, there isn't a need to maintain esx host. or storage administration like creating luns.
• A negative impact is cost. vCloud Director has a monthly cost for storage, processor core, memory, and licensing.

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