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SRM - a newbies point of view
February 11, 2016

SRM - a newbies point of view

Dan Forlano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with VMware Site Recovery Manager

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is used for mission critical servers. It gives us the ability to recover quickly, minimizing downtime in our globally supported company.
  • Ability to start servers in stages based on dependencies (DNS, DHCP, DC's first, database servers 2nd, applications 3rd, etc)
  • Ability to test failover in a "bubble network" Validate that the process does work in a controlled environment.
  • The ability to fail back is crucial. SRM has addressed this issue with its recovery plan policies.
  • Using self signed certs offer constant reconnections to remote devices.
  • Instruction or recommendations on how to patch, should you shutdown appliances or vmotion. Offer better understanding on DR (target) storage DRS or not to DRS, etc. This may be a vReplication issue.
  • Improve integration where vCenter service reboots are reduced or eliminated "Not Connected to SRM server" from vCenter to SRM error message "getAttribute: Session already invalidated".
  • 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.
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.
We use the 25 server license for our environment and can fit all our mission critical systems for DR/BC. The license worked well within our budget. Setting up a test process and walk-thru is probably the most difficult part of this process. An "easy" test button would be cool.