VMware Live Recovery Reviews

In my company, we use VMware SRM for virtual machine replication.

The most valuable feature of VMware SRM is RTO, better described as recovery time. In most places, my company uses SRM along with backup software since SRM cannot be used as a backup product as it is just a replication tool.

VMware SRM is not a popular product anymore since all the other backup products can provide the same functions as SRM. With Veritas, Arcserve, or Commvault, you can take care of the replication part. VMware SRM is not a popular choice among users anymore since it is a highly costly product while also being complex to configure. When it comes to backup products, you can use RTO and RPO, so there is no need to have a separate solution like SRM. 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 have been using VMware SRM for six to seven years. My company has a partnership with VMware.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

At the moment, just one of our company's customers uses the solution since we have replaced the native backup software used in our company. We need to take care of the renewal of SRM since, right now, we only take care of the renewal of vSphere in our company.

The solution's technical support is excellent.

The solution's initial setup was easy, but if you try to integrate it with other storage solutions, then it gets complex and difficult.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

For first-time users, VMware SRM can be a very difficult tool to use, especially considering the product's configuration part. The configuration is very difficult.

With VMware SRM, you have to download the separate appliance and think about Windows to build a separate native appliance while also having knowledge about ESXi, making it a difficult process. When it comes to VMware SRM, the technical things are very difficult to start in the first place.

I rate the overall tool a five out of ten.

In my company, we use VMware SRM for synchronous replication.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that vMotion is possible in VMware SRM, making it a great tool, especially when doing a DR drill. Synchronous replication and asynchronous replication are also some of the good features of the solution.

The weakness in VMware SRM is visible when, in our company, we try to do some cross-platform programming. For cross-platform programming, we might need some external tools, like Veeam or Commvault, for cross-hypervisor replication. It is not so easy to integrate it with other solutions. The aforementioned details can be considered for improvement of the solution.

The technical support is not quick enough to respond when a user tries to contact them. For improvement, the support should respond quickly to a user.

Cross-hypervisor restoration support or multi-platform support would be some of the best traditional features I would like to see in VMware SRM's future releases.

I have been using VMware SRM for two to three years. My organization functions as a cloud service provider. My company uses the product as well as recommends the product to the company's customers.

It is a very stable solution.

We haven't found any issues with VMware SRM's scalability.

In my company, most of the machines have been replicated through VMware SRM, which consists of very few and not many in numbers. We also use Veeam as a backup for external storage, making VMware SRM a handy tool for our company.

One or two administrators are enough to handle the solution.

Speaking about the product's future usage, our company doesn't have much of a requirement for VMware SRM because we majorly need it only for testing purposes. For our company, VMware SRM is not an important tool. Our company recommends VMware SRM to our customers since VMware has been putting out all these features, making its product better.

The solution's technical support is not bad since they are responsive. My company successfully resolved most issues we faced while working with the product. My company had raised only one or two issues with VMware, and they had successfully resolved our issues.

I rate the technical support a seven to eight out of ten.

Neutral

In our company, we use Nutanix Leap, which is similar to VMware SRM.

VMware SRM is available to users as a separate package from VMware, while Leap comes with Nutanix allowing users to use it anytime. In terms of utility, Nutanix Leap and VMware SRM are the same.

I was involved in VMware SRM's deployment phase two years ago, and it was an easy process.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

The setup phase of VMware SRM can be done within a day, and then the planning and all policies that need to be set up would take four to five days or even a week.

VMware SRM is expensive when compared to Veeam and makes Veeam look cheaper. For support, some additional payments need to be made over the licensing costs of the solution. Even with Veeam, additional payments must be made over the licensing costs.

VMware SRM is a handy solution since it does what it is told to do by its user while staying stable.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

We use SRM for our failover strategy. It is for disaster recovery on failover.

Our systems fail over using SRM. So, we do a big bang DR, which is biannual, and we fail over our fairly massive Epic electronic health record (EHR) and our core applications. It takes us about 30 minutes to fail over using SRM, which is pretty good. In most hospitals that have Epic installed, Epic does the audit to make sure that we can fail over if something were to happen. Normally, sites will have a DR solution specific to the EHR, but right now, our pain point is the third-party tier-one clinical applications.

We've had configuration issues on occasion. We start to fail over, and then we have to call it off because the configuration is not right, or the data stores aren't configured correctly in the secondary data center. Oftentimes, it is just the experience level of the team, and we have to bring in the vendor to help and validate our configuration.

I have been using this solution for probably five years.

Their support is excellent.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. There is some complexity there, and that's where I would bring it down from a 10.

We are consultants in disaster recovery software. We implement VMware products for our clients.

It is easy to implement for my clients. 

It's a very nice product.

I would like to see this solution be more scalable.

We currently use our security in addition to VMware SRM.

I am certified in VMware and VCloud. 

I have been using VMware SRM for ten years.

We have no issues with the stability of VMware SRM.

VMware SRM is scalable, but it can be improved.

We have 15 to 20 customers who are using SRM. We have customers not only in the US but in the UK also.

They provide very good technical support that is affordable.

We are also using Zerto.

It is very easy when it comes to integrating with a data center or an appliance, but it's a bit complicated.

The length of time it takes to deploy depends on the database we are accessing. It can take two hours to deploy.

We have two senior persons to deploy and maintain it.

I am not involved with the pricing. 

We have a procurement team and sales team that work with the vendors.

I would definitely recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate VMware SRM an eight out of ten.

We vetted out that data center a number of years ago. We were told SRM would improve our footprint within the data center and that was attractive to us at the time so we went with it.  

We are using VMware SRM but we are also currently looking into alternatives that could replicate the benefits that SRM currently provides for our on-premises installation. Once we are in the cloud, we are looking at whether or not we need dual availability zones. We also are looking at what functionality we could get from not having to change RPs (Recovery Point) as we do now with SRM.  

I would not be able to tell you the features and benefits that are best for the Engineering Teams. That would be more a question for my Engineering Manager and those guys. I am in service delivery and I am familiar with the product but not with hands-on use.  

The decision to move to another product is a matter of room for improvement around functionality and requirements that we had with AWS and moving to the cloud. We are not going to be procuring any more licensing for SRM when we make the move to the cloud. We were looking at a cloud-native solution in order to provide the same functionality as the SRM provides but in the cloud. That is just a matter of the changing environment.  

If the functionality of SRM could be replicated in the cloud, that would be the improvement we are looking for in the product.  

I have been using SRM (Site Recovery Manager) for probably six years.  

I have contacted technical support multiple times. I would not say that I am satisfied. They are not very good and need to make an effort to improve.  

The initial setup and installation were pretty straightforward. It was ten plus years ago so I do not remember the exact details, but I do not remember it being difficult at all.   

The cost of SRM is on par with market rates. So I think the costs for this product are fine.  

I personally will not continue using the VMware SRM solution. That is not a question of what is best. Our position moving forward is that we will not be having a footprint in the VMware space. If someone had the ability to focus on lots of things with using VMware in the cloud then there no issues at all with the product and this is a good solution for that purpose. The product functionality is fairly high-quality. Our decision is more based around the direction that we are taking. We will be cloud-based and we will be using AWS predominantly as our cloud-provider solution.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this solution overall as an eight-out-of-ten. It would not be closer to a ten because there is still some work that we need to carry out with regular maintenance and then there are the increasing license costs. An eight seems about right.  

Integrated replication / recovery plan ease of use and creation.

Running Production out of DR site

This product allows organizations to have a solid BC business continuity plan in place in case of disaster. By running regularly scheduled simulated test fail overs a business can realistically plan accordingly and customize their DR strategy.

Perhaps the array replication or vm guest customization features. Perhaps more features are needed to allow

For recovering VMs in situations where replication on production site has been paused for (ie: 1 week or more)

4 years.

Deployment is fairly straight forward but it still requires a good amount of VMware experience on the architecture side to properly deploy and scale.

No issues. Product is fairly stable.

No issues. This product scales according to licenses purchased.

SRM 5.8 scales very well as compared to v5.5

VMware customer service is great.

VMware technical support really delivers.

Previously used Netbackup and Avamar.

Initial setup is straight-forward but you need to really do some research on prerequisite environment config needed for this product to work as developed.

It was implemented in-house and on-site in customer environments.

100% ROI.

Other options evaluated were EMC Avamar and Symantec Netbackup.

You should aspire to be really well versed on supporting this product you need to have in-house engineers that are well rounded in the networking, storage and operational aspects of vSphere/vCenter/SRM. I would recommend getting hands-on training through a VMware a Partner before implementing this product in your environment.

We have three different VMs. During long business hours, we can shift from PR to DR. It has high availability.

Setting up VMs can be done quickly. It is easy to use. 

The improvements should be as per customer requirements. 

I have experience with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery.

The stability of the solution is a nine out of ten, as it is highly stable. 

Two hundred users are using the solution at present. 

I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. 

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

I use VMware SRM for DR testing and VR.

The solution is simple to use and has effective automation.

VMware SRM does not have the capacity to do DR tests. We had issues whenever we were doing tests with the root cause analysis. We had 70 to 80 percent successful results because the vCenters were overloaded and that was the reason that we were having capacity issues.

We have been experiencing an additional problem when adding a regular VM in the replicated storage. By default, it will show an error. However, there is not any monitoring mechanism that would show you are not supposed to have a regular VM which is non-VR in the replicated SRM storage. Whenever we used to do testing we had to figure out that a regular VM is there and remove it manually.

I have been using this solution for approximately seven years.

The stability should be smooth, and as for the capacity, we should be able to run the test successfully. However, from our research and DR test results, we came to the conclusion that we have to run the DR test during the non-production hours. Logically, they should be able to be done during the production hours, but that is not the case. We have to ensure that the vCenters are free and are not doing regular work for us not to have any issues during the DR test.

There needs to be better stability during heavy capacity in future releases.

The solution is easy to scale.

The solution is used extensively in our large organization.

When we first started out using this solution we encountered a few issues and used the support but we now know how to fix most of the issues and have not used them. Additionally, we have our own team for support.

The installation is logically simple and in the medium range of difficulty. However, you need to make sure you have the proper infrastructure.

I have evaluated Veritas and Zerto.

I would advise others looking into implementing VMware SRM not to totally be dependent upon it. Review other solutions, such as Veritas regulatory platform and Zerto. There are newer VM DR options coming out regularly and they should not have only one solution.

I rate VMware SRM a six out of ten.