VMware Live Recovery Reviews

We use SRM to replicate our important servers to our VR site. We are customers of VMware and I'm a junior manager. 

The replication part of SRM is really good. We once had our production site collapse completely and we were able to recover all the data. The restore level of the application is very good. 

The solution is on the expensive side. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

We've found the solution to be stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We used the documentation for our initial setup and had some difficulties. The deployment was carried out in-house and took a day or two. We had some help from colleagues in other companies and had a couple of people from our company involved in the deployment. 

We initially took out a five-year contract and recently extended it for another 12 months. It's quite an expensive solution. 

I think this is a good tool that's easy to manage and worth the cost, so I rate it nine out of 10. 

We use this solution to run our applications and our server functions.

We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable.

We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved.

We have been using this solution for around 10 years.

We have found this solution to be very stable so far.

We have found that the technical support team are not always competent enough to help with our issues, and often have to escalate them.

Neutral

We found that the initial setup for this product was quite easy.

We implemented this solution using a third-party team.

The level of licensing required for this solution is dependent on the server instances in use.

I would advise organizations who wish to use this solution, to ensure that their threat protection software is in place and up to date, as there isn't any threat protection embedded in this product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I mainly use VMware SRM for automation, creation of VMs, and monitoring.

VMware SRM's most valuable features are its convenience and its use of stretched clusters.

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. It would be much simpler if there was just one centralized, cloud-based place to manage both sites.  

I've been using VMware SRM for five years.

VMware SRM is stable.

VMware SRM is quite scalable.

The initial setup is complex and took almost a week to deploy. I would rate the installation experience as two-and-a-half out of five.

We used an in-house team.

VMware SRM is quite expensive.

If you're able to overcome the initial hump of setting up VMware SRM, it works very well. I'd give VMware SRM a rating of seven out of ten.

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.

In terms of recovery, if you have a test job script, you can put it on top of it. You can create custom steps so that it will be more granular. It will be an easy, one click solution when it comes to the recovery application.

It would be good if this solution could integrate configuration management software such as Chef Infra.

I've been using VMware SRM for more than a year.

The stability is always good because we replicate daily. I have never seen any issues because the replication is always 100% successful.

You can add multiple appliances, and it supports enterprise environments.

Technical support is very good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The deployment takes about three hours.

VMware SRM is the best sustainability solution, I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We have implemented SRM to replicate around the 800 virtual machines to the data recovery files. Due to the fact that we implemented to data centers as well as the primary and secondary data center, we use SRM to replicate around most of the virtual machines in order to be the secondary site.

If you can plan and create a recovery plan correctly, it will do and replicate virtual machines and when a disaster occurs, you can easily replicate off the secondary site. If you create a proper primary recovery plan, you have good protection.

The most important features that we're using are the replication of VMs as well as the integration with the EMC recovery platform. The replication solutions to replicate the LAN and data storage to the secondary external storage.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had an issue with the performance.

The solution is very flexible. 

VMware introduced the two next versions of the solution. They are SRM 6.5 and 6.7. I don't have any experience with these two products. However, if I was to talk about version 6, which we are using, at that time we faced a problem specifically when we create recovery plans. After the creation of the recovery plan, sometimes an issue happened in the GUI, in the Center. I'm not sure if that has since been resolved.

We've faced issues with the licensing. If you don't choose a specific license, you can only cover around five or ten virtual machines.

The biggest issue for us is that this product does not have any demo for customers. They should offer demos so that clients can try it out before they commit to buying a license.

At this point, I have been using the solution for about two or three years.

The stability of the solution is very good. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable.

In terms of scalability, you can integrate the POC and you can distribute SRM on three sites. At our project, we use VPLEX architecture to distribute storage between two data centers and therefore we could publish an important file related to SRM virtual machines and the active LANs, which is distributed between two data centers. In terms of scalability and holding of data storage, we can put a doc online whenever we need to.

Our team has around six members for virtual support and maintenance of the VMware infrastructure. In terms of the customers that are related to using the VMware services, there are around 800 people.

Due to the sanctions in my country, in Iran, we can not use direct support from VMware and there is not a partner in my country. Therefore, we need to study, we need to design, we need to support everything directly and focus on providing maintenance service to our customers ourselves.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not too complex. 

Deployments can typically take two months.

In the first month, I dedicate focus on learning and conducting POC sessions. For around two or three weeks, I also spend some time implementing SRM at the site.

I am responsible directly for installations.

I work with a specific team that includes three members. I'm responsible as a team lead and VMware engineer. I have two other team members, one member has a specific focus on its storage concept and another is working on the networking.

We are always looking for solutions that are more affordable. SRM is more expensive than, for example, VirtualBox.

I have looked into Zerto. I attended a seminar two years ago. If we ever moved off of this solution, we may switch to that. It is quite affordable and is very hands-on. It may even be easier in terms of deployment. They are very similar solutions overall.

We are using two product versions. We are using product versions 6.0 and 6.5.

We need to use only on-premises deployment models. This due to the fact that there are sanctions in my country. We cannot use the cloud services directly as there is no support.

For customers who are using VMware infrastructure, I recommend using VMware SRM due to the fact that it has the ability to integrate with other products like HP, SRA, or even CSRA. It has good features that integrate well with a storage concept.

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

VMware SRM is used for our disaster recovery site, which is an on-premises colo (Colocation) facility. The general use case is for disaster recovery for three of our applications those being imaging, payroll, and real estate.  

I would say SRM's ability to recover my virtual machines in a timely manner and to perform bi-annual testing are the two things it has provided that are really valuable.  

I would say VMware has room for improvement with this product. I am sure it is probably better in their 7.0 version, but there are still some bugs in the 6.O version that relates to using it with different browsers. I think a lot of what I run into is related to the 6.0 version. I believe a lot of those bugs have been fixed in the UI once you upgrade to 7.0.  

We have been using the VMware SRM solution for about six years.  

The stability of SRM has been excellent. I would give it a nine-out-of-ten. It is a pretty solid solution.  

I believe it would probably scale just fine. I only protect 25 VMs based on our licensing and I do it that way even though I actually have about 200 virtual servers. I can not really say I have done a lot to test scalability. In the six years that I have been dealing with SRM, I have just been protecting those 25 VMs. I do not have hands-on experience as to how well it would scale out.  

I have dealt with the technical support at times in the last year. I would give VMware's tech support a nine-out-of-ten. They are responsive and get you a useful reply.  

Disaster recovery was completely done with physical servers prior to when we started using VMware. When we went to VMware, we started using SRM. So the first time we went with the virtual environment we deployed SRM. We just went straight with SRM just because it is a VMware product. It was already well-integrated and did what we needed it to do.  

The installation and initial setup were pretty straightforward. The deployment, overall, was pretty straightforward. There was a little implementation structure we had to factor in related to my storage array. But besides that, it was pretty straightforward and easy enough all the way around.  

I pay for SRM per year. It is about $3,000 a year for the 25 pack. The package gives you the ability to protect up to 25 virtual machines.  

From what I have seen, a lot of these new hyper-converged systems come with certain components that do a lot of what SRM does. My opinion and advice to people considering SRM would be to look to your hardware vendor or consultant. They may have some replication pieces in there that allow you to possibly not use SRM or go ahead and stay with what you already have. Depending on your situation, different combinations might prove more beneficial either within the architecture or by cost-benefit. There are a lot of options out there now for disc replication and bringing machines up at other locations.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate the SRM as about an eight-out-of-ten.  

We primarily use the solution for migrating our DR site.

We have a system that can now move us to a DR site. I have yet to experience any major crisis, however, so I haven't yet tried it. 

The solution runs well in the background, just in case we need it. 

It is stable. 

The solution has the capability to scale well. 

I don't have any notes for improvement.

I'd like the installment and configuration to be more seamless.

The user experience could be more friendly.

It's, by definition, a complicated product. 

We'd like the entire solution to be more automated. We'd like as much automation as possible. 

The solution is very expensive. 

I've been using the solution for more than five years. 

We haven't had any stability issues. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable.

We have not tried to scale the solution. However, we are aware that it can be quite scalable. It depends on the license. 

The initial setup and configuration can be complex. It's a complicated product. I'd rate the complexity of implementation eight out of ten. 

It took us a few months to fully deploy the solution. 

We had an in-house team and professional service to manage the setup process. We did not do it fully by ourselves.

The pricing is very high. However, you get what you pay for. You need to invest a lot of money in order to gain any functionality. In order to have a DR site and maintain it, you need the investment. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. It's expensive. However, it's a good investment.