VMware Live Recovery Reviews

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

VMware is being used for disaster recovery to protect two sites.

The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly. It is quite good.

When used in conjunction with storage replication software it is not possible to separate and failover an individual VM. When the VMs are sitting on the same storage LUN, the granularity is not sufficient.  Ideally, we should be able to choose one virtual machine and separate it from the rest.

If the price were more competitive then it would be very good.

I have been working with VMware SRM for about five years.

It is stable for now. I haven't had any issues.

It is scalable, although the downside to scaling is the cost.

When I first contacted technical support, I had some issues. However, as time went on, the support has improved and I now think that it is okay.

Prior to using VMware SRM, we were doing everything manually. Failover of VMs was done manually from promoting the replicated LUNs to read write and then bringing them up in the DR VMware environment.  It was a lot of manual work when dealing with hundreds of VMs.

The initial setup is all right and we have had no issues with it.

The cost of SRM is a little bit high, especially for smaller companies.

Yes Veeam and RecoverPoint for VM

In summary, this is a mature product that works very well. It is easy to set up. I like the fact that it has a bubble test feature that allows you to test your configurations without actually failing over. However SRM is very pricy.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case is for the end-users. I work as a VMware software engineer and we have about 50 people using the solution. 

Some of its valuable features are that it's easy to use and the interface is quite simple as well. It's really a reliable and a good product.

Cost is definitely an area where the product could be improved, I'd definitely say it should have cheaper pricing.

Definitely the product could be faster and of course in IT everything is about pricing. 

We've been using the product for the past year. 

VMware SRM is very reliable and stable. 

The product is very scalable. 

I'm satisfied with the technical support we've received.

The setup is relatively complex because of how we use it so the setup can take some time.

We pay an annual licensing fee for the product. 

I would recommend the product to anyone requiring a disaster recovery process. 

I would rate this product an eight out of 10. 

Site Recovery Manager is valuable because it helps with the difficult problem of failing a group of virtual machines over to your DR site and bringing them up. Because there's things that must be changed in a machine in order to bring it up somewhere else like maybe its IP address or, you know, any slew of other things, the port groups or whatever it needs to be connected in, and you can either manually do all that by hand or you can program your recovery plan in Site Recovery Manager and it's pretty much, you know, menu driven because it's common things that you would have to do to a server in order to bring it up somewhere else, and you can go in there and you can actually have it prompt you to say oh, by the way, you need to turn on the database server before you turn on the next server. And it pauses and waits there so you can go over here and turn on your database server and then you click dismiss and it goes to the next step. Which you wrote all these steps into the Site Recovery Manager so that's what it does. Really helps execute a playbook for you to be able to help bring up your disaster recovery site.

You know, I've gone to a lot of Site Recovery Manager training here and stuff. One of the things that I think that they minimize is that normally you'll never use your DR site. But what you have to do every year is test your DR site.

Yeah, I would like more tools to help with editing the embedded databases. I have run into some issues where human error, not something that VMware themselves would have ever planned for, but human error, has caused the system to get out of sync. And the only way to correct that would be to actually manually edit the database, which you could do if Site Recovery Manager were on a Window server but now that everything's gone to this, Linux appliance, this sealed up appliance, it's very difficult to actually edit the database. Or maybe just have a reset button for them to be able to put everything back to a normal state. Maybe that's all they would need to do.

It's a very stable product. It is as scalable as VMware is itself.

It's really just an add on to the virtual center. It used to be responsible for replicating. It is no longer responsible for replicating. The replication portion of Site Recovery Manager has been moved to vSphere itself. A lot of people may not know this. So you do not need to buy Site Recovery Manager in order to replicate VMs around. You can do that for free. But the automation piece that I'm telling you about and the playbook and stuff is what you buy Site Recovery Manager for now.

I was responsible for designing and implementing a DR solution for my company and being that we're on a VMware environment it seemed only logical to go to VMware first because all the machines that I need to put at my, disaster recovery site are virtual servers I was like well I'm sure VMware has a solution.

Being able to test the environment, being able to make the changes to the virtual servers so they could come up on a different network. I needed to be able to go in there and change things like the IP address, the DNS settings and stuff like that to be able for them to come up at a different location.

Least favorite things about Site Recovery Manager. It is a little bit difficult to get it set up the first time you've ever just because it is so different.

Actually paid a consultant to come out and help me, train me on how to install it the very first time I installed it three versions ago but I've done it enough now to where I'm comfortable with it.

No, there weren't at the time I did it. I've been using Site Recovery Manager for several years so.

I always think there's room for improvement. They would seriously need to sit down and take a machine. I want to bring this machine up over here on a different network at a different location. And write down all the steps that they would manually do if they were going to do this process by hand. And like I said the replication is free. So they could technically replicate that over there right now today, make a copy of it and go oh, okay, go bring it up over there and write down all the steps that you have to manually do and then multiply that times the number of machines that you have to do for your DR site. 

In my case it's about one hundred. I need to bring up about one hundred servers. Then you sit there and think to yourself okay, so, and you could just, you know, take your watch and say okay, I'm going to start now. I'm going to go over there and see what it takes to get this server up at the DR site. Oh, that took me about 20 minutes. Okay, well, then, you multiply that times a hundred and you're at 200- 2000 minutes, okay. So would you have 2000 minutes’ worth of time to go through and bring, you know, work on all these servers in the-in the case of a DR scenario. And if the answer's no, then you probably should look at something to help you out. Some tool to help you out with that and that's what Site Recovery Manager brings.

Everybody looks at reviews and I look at the negative reviews as well because I feel like sometimes that some of the positive reviews may not have been real but, up, people will always complain about something they don't like. They're the most vocal so for Site Recovery Manager I would probably type in Site Recovery Manager reviews into a search engine.

This disaster recovery solution helps our clients with their mission-critical projects. They are able to maintain business continuity and increase the reliability of their services.

The most valuable feature is the integration with our Nutanix environment. If it didn't have this ability then we may not be using it.

There are sometimes performance issues when working with outside links, and it would be better if this were improved.

You need a lot of knowledge to work with the interface because it is not really easy to use, and it would be great if the dashboard were simplified.

I have been using VMware SRM for approximately two years.

I think that this product is very stable.

I have no issues in mind with respect to scalability or flexibility.

I have not been in contact with technical support. Usually, I get help from the community. The forums and websites are great for getting help.

I don't think that there is another product that serves the purpose that this VMware SRM does. Integration is very important to me, to have the whole environment integrated together in one place. Because of this, I went straight to VMware.

The complexity of the setup depends on the scenario, but some experience is needed for deployment and installation.

Using a consultant to assist with the deployment is common and this is what I recommend to my clients.

I did not evaluate other solutions.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Centralized recovery plans for thousands of VMs, Non-disruptive recovery testing, Automated DR workflows.

Lowers the cost of DR management, Eliminates clexity and risk of manual processes, Enables fast and highly predictable RTOs.

In my opinion if Vmware added some function to detect the business critical applications like oracle, exchange to help monitor these applications for disaster recovery .

7 years on many international projects.

In the earlier versions I had some issue, however all of them resolved now.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Excellent, I had some issues for trouble shooting which was far from my knowledge and vmware customer service remotely solved the problem.

Excellent

Yes, I used other products like Storage replications or some other software like "double take.” The problem with storage replication was that it was so risky and unstable to manually bring the application up on DR site, besides taking more time to restore.

Other software, like double take, we needed to do lot of effort on each application separately which makes the solution more complex.

In some basic installations, it is very straightforward, but for enterprise customers it makes sense to do some extra steps to protect applications and boot order.

Both, In my experience vendor teams like HP, EMC or net app, didn’t have much experience with this product, especially for the last 5 years, I mainly have to help them understand the solution.

Based on average of downtime cost on DR and how automation can help to bring the business on, SRM can reduce the cost nearly 50 percent; moreover you don’t need to have SAN storage on DR.

Setup cost was based on number of vms and protection plan, and if communication DR site has no any issue, within two weeks all setup can normally be finished and cost is around $300- $350 per day.

For some customer who want to protect small number of of applications, I will recommend to go with vendor disaster recovery solution, like Oracle data guard for oracle DB or Microsoft exchange replication or SQL log shipping for Microsoft SQL products.

Vmware SRM can handle all of the challenge of replication and disaster recovery in a simple way.

VMware failover is our primary use case of DC DR automation. We are integrated with array-based replication.

We had not achieved our RTO before the SRM implementation. But now, we have achieved our RTO for DR drill.

• Array-based integration is the most valuable feature.
• It has a user-friendly dashboard and will use the same vCenter console.

DR drill report is good but needs to be improved, and the replication monitoring feature is not available.

• Ease of management.
• Testing failover capabilities.

Gives us the ability for true DR testing, readiness.

Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice. Also, ability to give VMs different priority per Recovery Plan would be useful.

Four years.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Seven out of 10. I give them a seven because they don’t always get back within the SLA, and have had a few issues they took a long time to resolve.

No.

Fairly straightforward.

Licensing costs explode after 75 VMs.

We evaluated Zerto. We felt SRM/RecoverPoint gave us more flexibility in our solution. That was five years ago though.

I would recommend it.