VMware Live Recovery Reviews

SRM is implemented as part of VMware.

We use it for failover between geographical locations from one location to another location. Sometimes for maintenance purposes, we can failover services to another location so that we can maintain the technology at another location.

The solution works well. If you want to do failover, it works without any problem.

The product is stable.

The deployment process is fast.

The challenge it has is with the speed of failing over. Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers. Sometimes you realize that when you are failing over you can have downtime due to the fact that you're stepping down on one side and powering up on another side.

We've used the solution since 2012. It's been almost ten years.

The stability is great. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The scalability is just a function. Whether you can scale or not depends on your resources. It depends on your bandwidth. The scalability will depend on the infrastructure it is using.

We have three people who work with the solution directly.

The deployment doesn't take long. It also takes just a couple of hours as long as you have prepared and long as you have a design.

For the implementation process, we needed three people, however, for implementation, we need a trained engineer. Just one engineer is fine.

If you have trained people who are certified, you can do it yourself. The most important thing is to make sure that it is done by a trained engineer.

We do have to pay a licensing fee in order to use the solution. We have an annual subscription. 

I don't remember the version of SRM that we're using now.

I'd recommend the solution to others.

I would rate it at an eight out of ten.

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.

We are not an end-user. We are a solutions provider to companies.

All of its components are very competitive compared to other solutions. The application, the DR health check, and the scale-out file system are all great. They tailored a lot of technology in the VCDR, which is good. It's a very good solution overall.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

The solution is stable. 

Technical support is very proactive and helpful.

The solution has proven to be easily scalable. 

They need to have their own cloud, however, unfortunately, since the solution has been acquired by VMware, I doubt that will be happening.

It is impossible to acquire Datrium data nodes, unfortunately.

It would be ideal if they added advanced analytics or AI to the solution.

We've been working with the solution since before Datrium was acquired by VMware. 

In terms of stability, recently, we encountered an issue, however, it has been addressed immediately by support. It's now resolved. For the most part, the solution is stable. 

The scalability is pretty good. We just have to ask for additional space. Eventually, it will be guaranteed on demand.

There are many users on the solution. It's a big organization.

One of the good things about the solution is that it has very proactive support there. They are helpful and responsive and we are pleased with the level of assistance they offer.

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The solution is very straightforward and easy to set up. The deployment is quick and easy. In our experience, the solution only takes four hours to deploy. 

We're integrators and therefore can implement the solution for our clients. 

We looked at other solutions, however, the product is a very good technology. We have seen its many advantages as compared to other solutions. For example, the solution has been HCI disaggregated.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

We're an integrator. Our clients use the solution. We are not end-users. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

• 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.

It's user-friendly, for those who have learned and experienced the technology.

VMware is one of the best products in the industry when it comes to virtualization.

Technical support needs improvement, they are not very responsive.

You should be technically skilled enough so that you don't have to rely on its support. It's not easy when you don't get the support that you would expect to receive from VMware.

I have been working with this solution for more than five years.

VMware SRM is a stable solution. It's very reliable.

VMware SRM is a scalable solution.

We have always had trouble reaching out to support and connecting with their support engineers.

I would rate the technical support a three out of five.

Neutral

In terms of VMware, we use a variety of solutions, such as VMware vSAN, VxRail, Center, and SRM.

I would rate VMware SRM an eight out of ten.

The recovery plans and customization options. I also the love the re-protect feature for easier fallback.

We were able to migrate 100 virtual servers to our St. Louis office with very little downtime.

I would like to see the database come built-in to the product. I would also prefer to the SRM server come as a virtual appliance instead of a windows vm. I would also like to see a way to control bandwidth usage.

3 years.

No, the process is very well documented.

No, but you need to have a good understanding of your bandwidth between sites. SRM does not have a native way to throttle bandwidth usage.

No.

Excellent.

Excellent.

We looked at various types of solutions like Veeam, DoubleTake and Neverfail.

It was very straightforward.

In-house.

We were able to reduce the cost of our overall DR infrastructure while increase our recovery time. We are seeing a 25% return.

Yes, Veeam, Neverfail and DoubleTake.

Take the time to understand your change rate of your servers, your bandwidth capabilities and the recovery objects for your DR plan.

The automatic activation of the storage volumes and bringing up all VM’s. The recovery plans and resource mapping are good features.

With the resource mapping we can use different networks to bring up our VM’s

We can easily create a test environment with the SRM testing functionality, also in combination with EMC recoverpoint we can start up a virtual machine to a given point in time.

Automatic guest customizations through a GUI is a missing feature. Also the new version of SRM is web-only and is not that stable as the old client version.

We had couple of times that the web interface crashed and needed to restart the services.

7 years.

No issues encountered.

No, but the new web client is sometime ‘buggy.'

No issues encountered.

We needed to use customer service a couple of times while upgrading versions but all went fine.

8/10

No previous solution used.

It wasn't complex.

We used a vendor team and their expertise was good.

This product makes it easy for us to have a managed DR. Also the point in time functionality to bring up vm’s is a cost-saving method for us during the upgrade / testing period.

No other options evaluated.

Read and follow the admin guide, otherwise when you miss a step you can search long time. Also use the correct storage adapter of your storage vendor.