VMware Live Recovery Reviews

We typically use it for disaster recovery testing. It automates the process of failing over from a protected site to a recovery site, helping us achieve our RTO (Recovery Time Objective).

It has simplified data center application and failover processes, but the underlying technologies can be challenging. 

If we're using replication appliances, configuring them to work with SRM can be complex. Additionally, bandwidth and VM size can impact performance.

I would rate the ease of setting up and configuring my recovery plan in VMware SRM, a ten out of ten, with ten being the easiest.

The "Test Failover" feature is valuable. It lets us run a test and see if recovery reaches the RTO. It also shows us any issues with our VMs. 

It prompts us to perform a test failover by failing over a vm or a group of vms. Once the failover is complete, it verifies if the recovery reaches its initial stage.  We can also manually trigger the failover by the click of a button.

We also used the non-disruptive testing feature but only on a few test machines to confirm functionality. It works well.

There is room for improvement in the replication interface and functionality. Every time you open a remote site, you need to sign in again.

Ideally, single sign-on after integrating with vCenter should provide secure credentials that avoid re-entering passwords for every remote site access. It takes time every single time.

It has a ton of features, but ease of use could be improved. It gets better with automatic configuration over time, adapting to access. If you bring in a storage test application, maybe an automatic plug-in to the adapter, say for HPE or other storage providers, would be helpful. We wouldn't have to go to the provider's sites to download them.

The product itself is smooth, but timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas.  When this happens, we encounter errors. In our most recent environment, we left the virtual machines running at the recovery site, hoping to avoid redeployment.

In this organization, we have been using it for about five years. I've been working with it for more than that overall, maybe eight years.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

The usage is restricted to a maximum of three users. They are administrators. It does not need much scaling because one server can manage a certain number of hosts. It really depends on the underlying replication infrastructure.

Overall, I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

The escalation matrix seems to depend on who gets the tickets. There are many articles due to AI, so the customer service and support want you to go through those first, even when you need immediate support. It also depends on your package. Weekend support is limited (Monday-Friday), which isn't ideal for disaster recovery. For disaster recovery, we want 24/7 support.

But once we get to an actual support person, it's good.

Neutral

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, with ten being easy. 

The complexity of the initial setup depends on the deployment model and current infrastructure. 

On the new base, it will be difficult because we need to install it with existing replication in place. That requires knowing how to integrate the tool. On-premise or cloud integration is a bit easier. 

Deployment itself is minimal. Configuration takes longer, usually a day or two.  It may take more or less time, depending on the size of the environment. 

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive. VMware sells in bundles of 50 VMs, so if we want to expand with a smaller number, we have to buy the whole bundle.

Overall. I would rate the solution a nine out of ten because it helps our organization. 

In my area of expertise, which is resiliency, I primarily use VMware SRM for disaster recovery use cases. I also use it for backup and data loss prevention use cases, making it easier to manage and safeguard critical data within virtualized environments.

VMware SRM has improved our organization's value by consistently meeting our clients' time requirements when deploying solutions. When we implement SRM for our clients, it helps ensure that their disaster recovery and data protection needs are addressed within their expected timeframes. 

In terms of resiliency, the most valuable aspect of SRM has been its effectiveness.

There is room for improvement in the automation and orchestration aspects of this solution.

I have been using VMware SRM for ten years.

I would rate the stability of the solution as a seven out of ten. Like any software, we do encounter glitches and the need for patches and fixes from time to time, which is a normal part of maintenance. However, there is room for improvement in terms of patching processes, including reducing delays and addressing issues in applying patches. Additionally, better documentation would enhance the overall experience with the solution.

I would rate the scalability of VMware SRM as a six out of ten. Scalability challenges occur occasionally, especially during migrations from on-premises to the cloud, as it is often a gradual process over several months. Creating a financial model that aligns with this scalability can be quite challenging. Within our organization, which has a worldwide presence, approximately 90,000 people use this solution. However, in specific areas like the delivery organization and operations, the user count is in the hundreds.

I would rate the technical support as an eight out of ten.

Positive

I would rate the easiness of the initial setup as a seven out of ten. In our company, VMware SRM is deployed both on-premises and on the cloud. It took about two months to deploy it and it was done in-house. The number of staff required for deployment typically ranges from two to six people, depending on the size of the project. Maintenance for this solution is typically provided by the developers or vendors. We have maintenance agreements with various providers like VMware, Rubrik, Veeam, and Commvault, and hardware maintenance is handled by the hardware provider through our maintenance contracts.

I would give it an eight out of ten in terms of costliness.

Overall, I would rate VMware SRM as a seven out of ten.

In my company, we use VMware SRM for its disaster recovery capabilities. It is a tool for automating and orchestrating the disaster recovery of our company's IT environment.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can independently run the disaster recovery without disturbing the production instances. You can demonstrate that your disaster recovery is foolproof without encountering any disaster in your IT environment. You can demonstrate to your company's leadership team that business continuity is available for all applications. Even in a disaster scenario, one would be able to recover their environment in a certain period of time.

Currently, the recovery manager is primarily for only VMware environments or virtual machines running on VMware. Suppose the recovery manager can be extended to a non-VMware environment. In that case, we can integrate all of the tools in an IT environment together and function using one single recovery manager. Allowing for integrations with non-VMware products and environments will really help.

I have been using VMware SRM for more than ten years.

It is a pretty stable solution.

Scalability will not be applicable to VMware SRM since it is a product that does disaster recovery. Its scalability can be considered because you can add additional nodes to the product if you want to scale while ensuring you have the required licenses.

We use the solution for more than 100 customers.

The initial setup of VMware SRM isn't straightforward because many customizations are required since it helps in the recovery of your IT environment. It is not the tool but the process that is complex. The tasks associated with using the tool in an environment for disaster recovery are complex.

The product's deployment process takes around three to four weeks to complete.

For the deployment process, you need to assess your environment before getting into the design phase, after which you need to understand the business objectives and goals clearly to design your target environment. Once your environment is ready, then you need to understand the steps you need to follow to configure VMware SRM to achieve your target state. I would say assessment followed by defining a clear business objective, and then after design, you have to build the environment.

There is a need for an architect to take care of the design part of the solution, along with a couple of engineers and a dedicated project manager to run the product during the deployment phase. There is a need for at least two engineers to run the product.

The licensing costs for the product are perpetual in nature. A person needs to buy the license only once there is a need to buy support on a yearly basis. The licensing cost for VMware SRM is expensive.

I recommend those wanting to use the solution completely understand their own environment since VMware SRM is meant for VMware environment only. You cannot integrate VMware SRM with other non-VMware products. If your requirements are very much restricted to VMware alone, then VMware SRM can be a good choice for managing activities related to disaster recovery. If you have a mixed environment, you need to think and look for other products in the market other than VMware SRM.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We use SRM to invoke DR and to move workloads across the DR side.

The thing I like the most about SMR is the reduced cost of management.

VMware SRM lacks certain functions that other platforms have, such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles.

I've been using VMware SRM for a long time, almost ten years.

It's a good and stable product. They do a lot of testing.

I think it's scalable. When you work for big organizations, I don't think that's much of a problem. There are multiple and fairly large clusters. That's one of the ways that we reduce cost because we are building things like sequel clusters. Approximately 5,000 people use SRM at our company.

The technical support is great. VMware staff help with deploying and testing. In terms of building storage clusters, metro clusters, stretch clusters across sites so that, you get all of the benefits of a local cluster, but they're deployed between the lines and the DR side. It's a fantastic technology and VMware provides you with their best people.

Positive

Before VMware SRM, we were using Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas Replication Manager for stand-alone. When we went to virtualize, we moved to SRM. I did a lot of work with IBM PowerVM and it had some nice features. It had things such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles where you could put one VM across another so that it grabbed the resources. You could do things such as have thin DR VMs without much allocation of CPU or memory, and then as you boot them, they start to grab all of that automatically from all of the non-prod. Functions like that were quite good in Power VM, which aren't quite as present in the VMware world. PowerVM is extremely expensive to use and that's why everyone is shifting towards commodity computers.

I'm an architect so I did not install SRM myself, but I think there were no issues with installing it since it's a pretty standard tool nowadays. It does not require much maintenance. We are still running some old versions of VMware as there was a challenge around Oracle licensing. We are moving the Oracle workloads off of it now and addressing the architecture to get rid of the copies of the legacy versions of VMware. 

SRM is quite pricey and the license is renewed annually. I think that they do a lot of ULAs, the universal license agreements, where you pay a set amount and get unlimited usage. That's how it usually goes with big companies. Occasionally, they do true-ups to work out how much you've got and whether ULA pricing is appropriate. It might be too expensive for smaller organizations.

I would advise new users to start off with manual processes and document exactly what they want to come up with in the right order. Get your IT continuity plan defined very closely and with a great amount of detail. Then start to automate with your SRM tooling to make sure that things are brought up in the right order and ensure that if one service fails and you need to bring another one across for latency purposes, you really understand all of those requirements before you start to just implement SRM and marching on without really understanding how the services tie together and the dependencies between them.

Overall, I would rate SRM an eight out of ten.

In this scenario of disaster recovery, we start simply with our VMs. We have just two packs of 25 VMs. We just protect just about 15 VMs.

Thanks to SRM, we haven't had any kind of disaster in our environment.

The disaster recovery has been good. 

In the case of a disaster, the product is very simple. We have security and lower downtime. 

It's very reliable. The solution is stable. 

Its design is good and it does what it is intended to do. 

We are limited to 50 VMs.

The main limitation is the fact we can just activate the product in a disaster scenario. Sometimes we need to activate some VMs in the backup or disaster recovery sites, even if our main site is okay. However, in our current environment, we cannot do this due to the limitations of SRM.

The back sites sometimes are very, very complicated. It is the nature of the product. Sometimes we use vMotion to achieve this kind of objective.

We've used the solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The soluton is scalable. We are doing preparing our environment to be active site-to-site - both the production site and secondary site.

We have 900 people in total on the solution. 

We're in the process of changing things now. 

Technical support is good. We've been very pleased with the responsiveness and helpfulness. 

Positive

We've only used SRM. We did not use anything previously.

More or less, due to the product itself, it's relatively easy to set up. However, in our environment, we have a VM, and that VM application is very complicated. Sometimes we have some issues in running this application on the backup site. This is not due to this SRM. Rather, it is due to our environment.

The deployment took about two years. 

We have a team of four people that can handle deployment and maintenance duties. They are all specialists. 

Sometimes we talk to the local reseller of VM products. We also consult with the vendor of the hardware product. In Brazil, for the government, we have a procurement process. It is not personal. We can just publish our request for a quotation. Any local reseller or national reseller can offer their services.

We've never calculated ROI. 

We pay 400,000 Brazilian Reals for the license. There are no other fees associated with the product.

Most of our VMs are VMware. However, we are changing some VM products, and maybe we will use something else. We are just evaluating at this time. We haven't really seriously evaluated anything. We just update our existing license to support and update.

We are just a customer. 

I'm not sure which version of the product we're using. However, we are updating right now, in the next month. 

Right now, our environment is on-prem. We want to install the hyper-converged to start moving to the cloud.

I'd advise others to maintain the solution and keep it up to date. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We use this solution to run our applications and our server functions.

We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable.

We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved.

We have been using this solution for around 10 years.

We have found this solution to be very stable so far.

We have found that the technical support team are not always competent enough to help with our issues, and often have to escalate them.

Neutral

We found that the initial setup for this product was quite easy.

We implemented this solution using a third-party team.

The level of licensing required for this solution is dependent on the server instances in use.

I would advise organizations who wish to use this solution, to ensure that their threat protection software is in place and up to date, as there isn't any threat protection embedded in this product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

VMware SRM is deployed with some clusters. However, if the customer uses a three-tier architecture or other configurations, SRM might not be applicable. The expectation is not always to achieve 100% coverage. SRM is used for virtual machines with stringent SLAs or critical business applications. SRM is often sold in packs of 25 virtual machines, and deployment and functionality testing are conducted based on customer needs.

The simplicity of VMware SRM is one of its most important features. SRM console is straightforward to manage. It offers simplicity in monitoring, managing, and deploying, making it a unique value proposition. Additionally, Nutanix solutions also provide a simple GUI, which helps in operational efficiency.

The solution's recovery processes are very simple but not intelligent because one can easily monitor the replication progress and how the application is going. There is a workflow defined for doing their testing.

I have been using VMware SRM as a partner for ten years.

VMware SRM is a scalable solution due to its ease of documenting virtual machines. The process is straightforward if a customer already utilises 25 virtual machine licenses and requires more. They can execute the addition of the following 25 licenses. Then, they can enable those licenses and add the corresponding virtual machines to their application jobs.

It depends. We have customers using both twenty-five virtual machines and those with more than one hundred virtual machines. Therefore, the usage of VMware SRM varies from customer to customer, resulting in a mix-and-match environment.

The initial setup is very straightforward, depending on the kind and number of virtual machines.

A customer is expecting 25 virtual machines to deploy from the SDR. So, it should not take more than two days of work. If fine-tuning is required, it may take additional time, depending on the bandwidth. It's dependent on the infrastructure and varies case by case based on the bandwidth capability. Data will replicate faster with higher bandwidth, whereas lower bandwidth will result in longer replication times. Depending on the scenario, with good bandwidth, it could be a matter of only 24 hours.

Furthermore, the primary site's data size and change rate also play significant roles. If there are frequent changes at the primary site, it will naturally take more time. Additionally, the size of the primary data is another crucial aspect to consider.

The challenge is the licensing has changed from physical software to core-based, from perpetual to subscription-based.

The pricing for VMware SRM can vary significantly based on factors such as the customer segment, brand, and specific requirements.

The solution is straightforward to deploy and easy since it provides all the SRM functionality, such as security manager, with a seamless experience. 

We need to simulate for DLP . We need to freeze the application and do audio testing, and if there is an update on our data site, we need to provide feedback.

Specific solutions are pure-play SRM solutions. This solution acts as a recovery manager because the providers understand the workflow, prepare it, and know the dependencies. For instance, they understand the dependencies between virtual machines and applications, databases, ADA DNS, CSV, etc., and document them in the workflow. This documentation ensures the workflow can be executed properly, leading to a minimal Recovery Time Objective. ADR minimize RTO through automation, improving the workflow within SRM and eliminating the need for third-party solutions for security and other aspects.

Once we receive an order, we initiate thorough planning and documentation. We prepare a comprehensive flow-level design and engage with the customers for confirmation. With a clear understanding of the entire expectation cycle, my team can effectively deploy the solution, ensuring seamless integration.

Maintaining VMware SRM involves setting it up correctly and regularly monitoring it for infrastructure changes. Once appropriately configured and monitored, it operates smoothly unless there are changes at the customer site, such as patch deployments or alterations to authentication or access rights. These changes can potentially lead to application failures. Therefore, ongoing vigilance is necessary to ensure the seamless operation of the solution. Bandwidth issues can also affect performance, so addressing such concerns is essential.

I strongly recommend confirming with the new Broadcom team whether their VMware SRM licensing has changed since the acquisition of Broadcom. They've consolidated their SKUs from over a hundred to ten if there have been significant changes in SRM licensing, features, or functionality.

VMware SRM offers simplicity in disaster recovery solutions. However, it's primarily optimized for VMware environments. If a customer prefers a non-VMware-focused solution at their data centre, SRM may face challenges. Converting virtual machines in such cases can be complex and cumbersome. 

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use VMware SRM for disaster recovery.

VMware SRM replicates the VM from one site to another, and it helps us orchestrate the powering of VMs and DR when the DC goes down.

Currently, there is a limitation of consolidating only 15 sites per SRM.

Ransomware recovery or early detection could be incorporated into VMware SRM.

I have been using VMware SRM for three years.

VMware SRM is a stable solution.

VMware SRM is a scalable solution. I work with mostly small and medium businesses.

VMware SRM’s technical support is good.

Positive

We previously used Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator, which is more suited for small businesses. It doesn't offer as much flexibility as VMware SRM. For namesake, it's a DR solution, but it cannot compete with VMware SRM.

VMware SRM's initial setup is easy.

Two people can install VMware SRM in two to three hours.

We pay a yearly licensing fee for VMware SRM, which is not very expensive.

The fee is for the solution's license plus support. There are two options. One is subscription-based, which would be for a one or two years term base, and the other one is perpetual with support.

Just one person is enough to maintain the solution.

I highly recommend VMware SRM to other users.

Overall, I rate VMware SRM a nine out of ten.