Progress Chef vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Progress Chef
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
Chef IT infrastructure automation suites were developed by Chef Software in Seattle and acquired by Progress Software in September 2020. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is an integrated suite of automation technologies presented as a solution for delivering change quickly, repeatedly, and securely over every application's lifecycle. The Chef Effortless Infrastructure Suit is an integrated suite of automation technologies to codify infrastructure, security, and compliance, as well as…N/A
VMware SRM
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
VMware's Site Recovery Manager (VMware SRM) is a disaster recovery option, used to automate orchestration of failover and failback to minimize downtime and improve availability with VMware Site Recovery Manager.N/A
Pricing
Progress ChefVMware Site Recovery Manager
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Progress ChefVMware SRM
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Progress ChefVMware Site Recovery Manager
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Progress ChefVMware Site Recovery Manager
Small Businesses
HashiCorp Vagrant
HashiCorp Vagrant
Score 9.9 out of 10
Axcient x360Cloud
Axcient x360Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
NAKIVO Backup & Replication
NAKIVO Backup & Replication
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Ansible
Ansible
Score 8.9 out of 10
Zerto
Zerto
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Progress ChefVMware Site Recovery Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(18 ratings)
7.3
(7 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(1 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.7
(3 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.6
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Progress ChefVMware Site Recovery Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
Progress Software Corporation
Chef is a fantastic tool for automating software deployments that aren't able to be containerized. It's more developer-oriented than its other competitors and thus allows you to do more with it. The Chef Infra Server software is rock-solid and has been extremely stable in our experience. I would definitely recommend its use if you're looking for an automation framework. And it also offers InSpec which is a very good tool for testing your infrastructure to ensure it deployed as intended.
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VMware by Broadcom
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
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Pros
Progress Software Corporation
  • Chef is great at deploying code to both small and large groups of servers.
  • We use chef to standup new servers as well as deploy updated code to existing servers and it does this very well.
  • Being able to make a change and have it push manually or automatically to any subset of servers has changed the landscape of how our IT teams operate.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • 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.
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Cons
Progress Software Corporation
  • Chef could do a better job with integration with other DevOps tools. Our company relies on Jenkins and Ansible, which took some development and convincing for plug-ins to be created/available.
  • It would be nice if kitchen didn't only have a vagrant/virtual-box prerequisite. Our company one day stop allowing virtual-box to run without special privileges, and that caused a lot of issues for people trying to do kitchen tests.
  • Chef could use more practice materials for the advanced certification badges. There was not a lot of guidance in what to study or examples of certain topics.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Progress Software Corporation
No answers on this topic
VMware by Broadcom
- easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster
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Usability
Progress Software Corporation
The suite of tools is very powerful. The ability to create custom modules allows for unlimited potential for managing all aspects of a system. However, there is pretty significant learning curve with the toolset. It currently takes approx 3-4 months for new engineers to feel comfortable with our implementation
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VMware by Broadcom
VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.
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Performance
Progress Software Corporation
It loads quick enough for basically all our systems. Because we have this for local dev environments, speed isn't really a big issue here. Yes, depending on the system, sometimes it does take a relatively long time, but it's not an issue for me. One thing that is annoying is that if I want to make a small change to a cookbook and re-run the Chef client, I can't just make the change in the cache and run it. I have to do the whole process of updating the server.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Progress Software Corporation
Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.
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VMware by Broadcom
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Progress Software Corporation
We considered the three leading competitors in the field: Chef, Puppet and Ansible. Ansible is a very strong competitor and has a nice degree of flexibility in that it does not require a client install. Instead the configuration is delivered by SSH which is very simple. Puppet seems like it has fallen off the pace of the competition and lacked the strong community offered by Chef. We chose Chef because of the strong support by the company and the dynamic and deep community support.
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VMware by Broadcom
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.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Progress Software Corporation
The pricing seemed inline with our products in this space. Nothing out of the ordinary in contract, term, or pricing structure
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Progress Software Corporation
The entire professional services team was great to work with. The curriculum was tailored to our specific use cases. The group we worked with were very responsive, listened to our feedback, was very easy to schedule and accommodate. I cannot say enough good things about our professional services experience
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Progress Software Corporation
  • Chef is a good tool for baselining servers. It will be a good ROI when there are huge number of servers. For less number of servers maintaining a master will be an over head.
  • One good ROI will be that the Operations Team also gets into agile and DevOps methodologies. Operational teams can start writing scripts/automations to keep their infra more stable and their application stack more reliable.
  • Implementation of Chef eliminates the manual mode of doing things and everyone aligns to automation mind set. It helps in change of culture.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • 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.
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