TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

VMware SRM

Score9 out of 10

32 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

What is VMware SRM?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about VMware SRM.
View all reviews

Easy Peasy Site Recovery

Incentivized
Ravinder GuptaView profile
Senior Oracle Database Administrator in Information Technology at CGI (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Ease of configuration. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn how VMWare SRM is configured and executed.
  • Creation of multiple protection groups and recovery plans helps implementing recovery priority and partial/full site recovery as required.
  • No additional tasks for managing replication. SRM takes care of replication from failover site to old primary site automatically.

Cons

  • I am not very pleased with the overall licensing cost. It's pretty expensive. Especially if you have a small number of VMs, you are paying a lot.
  • We had a little struggle getting our support tickets resolved by VMWare support.

Return on Investment

  • Our overall ROI seems to be pretty good, as ease of using VMWare SRM has helped us reducing cost of hiring separate virtualization experts. The task is being performed by our System Admins.
  • SRM steps execution was pretty smooth in our DR exercise. This has helped us achieve our RPO and RTO well under contracted limits.

Alternatives Considered

Veeam Backup & Replication

Other Software Used

Oracle Exadata Database Machine

Usability

SRM - not what it used to be...

Alejandro ContrerasView profile
Infrastructure Architect in Information Technology at SERVICEMYBUSINESS.COM (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Easy to build a recovery plan
  • Easy to test recovery plans
  • Works with storage based replication or non storage based replication

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • Due to the very poor experiences we had with the setup and their support teams, I would not recommend it.

Alternatives Considered

Veeam Availability Suite, Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE

Other Software Used

Veeam Availability Suite, Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam ONE

A good choice for a 100% VMware environments.

Incentivized
Carlos Daniel Casañas Bertolo ஃView profile
Director in Information Technology at Leverage - Advisory & Consultancy (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We installed it to provide enterprise-level protection to all virtualized applications.This tool allows customers to replicate virtual machines between sites.

Pros

  • Provides enterprise level protection to all virtualized applications
  • Allows one to choose between built-in vSphere Replication and a wide range of supported storage replication products.
  • Provides non-disruptive testing and automated failback.

Cons

  • Better UI, and CLI functions
  • Too slow at some tasks, it will be nice to accelerate it

Return on Investment

  • Good ROI, only for vmware enviroments
  • Veam its a real option in some enviroments

Other Software Used

Veeam Availability Suite, Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam ONE

DR Automation with VMware Site Recovery Manager

Incentivized
Abhishek ThakorView profile
Associate Consultant in Information Technology at Energy Future Holdings (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Very easy to set up disaster recovery.
  • Easy to manage and troubleshoot any issue.
  • One click to failover and failback.
  • Data sync is live and very consistent.
  • Pre-configuration of DR IP so after failover all VMs automatically bring up new IPs, no further configuration required.
  • Excellent VMware support in case of any failure.
  • Disaster recovery set up and configuration can be verified by running tests in test mode and capture the test results.
  • Priority level, server dependencies can be pre-configured.

Cons

  • Missing plug-in in VI Client.

Return on Investment

  • Better customer service.
  • Employees actually like to work on VMware Site Recovery manager and are very happy to see the overall out come.

Alternatives Considered

Storage Level replication and manual failover /failback

Other Software Used

VMware vCenter Server, VMware ESXi, VMware ThinApp

Automated Disaster Recovery

Incentivized
Kunal GuptaView profile
Senior Manager in Information Technology at HCL Technologies America Inc (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • We had a very poor experience with backups and VMWare restored our faith.
  • The product make critical applications highly available and [provides the] ability to perform DR in minutes.
  • Ease of use and ability to test scenarios with zero downtime.

Cons

  • Limited flexibility and non-verbose logging.
  • Overall license cost.
  • Slightly tricky implementation.

Return on Investment

  • Provided more hands on guidance.
  • [VMWare Site Recovery Manager also impacted our] Functionality and integration [and] lack of orchestration.

Alternatives Considered

CA Nimsoft Monitor, CommVault, EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS, Oracle Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Symantec NetBackup and VCE Vblock

Other Software Used

NetApp OnCommand, VMware ESXi, Cisco Unified Computing System Manager