Microsoft Azure vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

In terms of cloud computing, Microsoft Azure is the only comprehensive result the company offers. Regardless of how big or small an organization is, it can make use of this system. As a cyber-security professional, this is your best option for data management. A business that wants to minimize capital expenditures can use Microsoft Azure. Many Microsoft services accept it. People with little or no knowledge of cloud computing may find it impossible. It isn’t the solution for companies that don’t want to risk having only one platform and infrastructure vendor.

It's quite well suited for a medium to large size VMWare virtualization infrastructure where your production infrastructure can be failed over to a disaster recovery site. There are other cheaper options for a smaller budget business. Also, for a non mission critical virtual infrastructure, you can simply use VM backups such as Veeam backups for restoring failed VMs

Incentivized

• Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
• Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
• BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
• Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.

Incentivized

• Easy configuration and setup.
• Testing of a particular VM or datastore with several VMs is easy.
• Auto configuration of IPs makes the process even easier.

Incentivized

• In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
• Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
• Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.

Incentivized

• It’s unfortunate, but more and more, the quality of VMware’s products and the technical support teams behind them has degraded significantly. We have opened several support requests within the last few months and ended up resolving a large majority ourselves due to the poor performance of their remote teams.
• VMware is suffering from the same illness that’s affecting multiple U.S. technology firms, in that their focus has shifted completely away from their customers and moved to pleasing investors. In doing so, clients suffer because they do not get properly tested products and the support teams behind them are very weak and overwhelmed.
• We worked close to a month trying to get SRM V6.5 to work. We have worked with many previous versions of SRM in the past while using HP EVAs, NetApps and Hitachi arrays, and we can honestly say that we are greatly disappointed with this release and the company.
• We escalated right up to engineering, but their response times were brutally slow; the technicians were juniors at best.
• As a technology leader, the last thing you want during a DR is to be dealing with a company that just can't deliver. SRM is not cheap, and you would expect much better products and support from VMware.
• If you are comparing products, try other companies like Veeam... We ended up using them instead, the setup and execution was easy and seamless, and they answered all our questions quickly and efficiently. They actually do care about their clients.

Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.

- easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster

Incentivized

Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"

Incentivized

VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.

Incentivized

It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators

Incentivized

Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.

Incentivized

Sometimes we have to struggle explaining the problem and getting it resolved on priority. The overall quality of support team is not as good as it used to be in past.

Incentivized

As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.

As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.

Incentivized

Entertained Veeam, however with SRM's tight integration and "brand" it was an easy decision. The cost for a 25 server license also weighed in the decision for using a VMware product. Plus I am a VMware fan and feel this option to go with SRM will transcend jobs.

Incentivized

• Brings down Capex to customers.
• Some of the built-in security features of DDoS Basic protection that comes with VNET on Azure or even WAF on AGW brings huge advantages to customers.
• Hybrid benefits for those who have software assurance can save even more costs by moving to Azure.

Incentivized

• The biggest positive is that we have a data recovery solution that we can test and verify in a live condition. Prior to this we were only hoping we could recover from a disaster.
• We've been only running for 4 months and haven't had to use SRM.

Incentivized