VMware Cloud Director vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

If you have a lot of customers that all need to have a separate place to work in, without the possibility of getting in each other way, and you want to safe yourself a lot of work. Than I strongly recommend you Cloud director. Ofcourse, only if you have a VMware environment as your working environment. If you just have a small group of customers and you can easily handle the work that's coming from it, then it is overkill to add cloud director to your environment. In a later station, you can always introduce cloud director (so tis never to late if you still want to use it)

Incentivized

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

• Building virtual racks
• Managing the customers' network and security
• Simplicity but the completeness of IaaS solution
• Integration with major software providers

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

• The add-on/extension required on the internet browser sometimes are difficult to get working at first. We've experience instances where the add-on/extension latest versions will not work and have to downgrade to an older version.
• The server console lacks features and tools. For example it would be useful to have a copy and paste tool or a file upload tool.
• The vCloud Director management site uses Adobe Flash, which makes it impossible to use on a mobile device.

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.

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

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

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

vCloud Director is definitely my favorite as far as cloud managers. The only thing that compares is Cisco UCS Director, but it has slightly different functionality and purpose. I understand why a lot of clients still go with vCloud Director even though VMware intends to sunset it

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

• Saves a lot of time, and time is money
• Stable, so little to non downtime
• With P1 , good support

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