VMware Live Recovery Reviews

Test run in protected environment

More confidence over DR services

vSphere Replication feature

Four years.

We had an issue with the Array SRA.

We had a problem connecting to the SRM plug-in.

No issues encountered.

Good.

Average.

No previous solution used.

Initial set-up was straightforward.

We used a vendor that was good.

Do a POC whilst keeping the environmental constraints in mind.

Cost

We have had some customers that were hit with some random wear and we were able to restore the files from SRM with minimal downtime.

Nothing I have run into as of yet.

About 8 months.

It was deployed prior to my arrival with the company.

None encountered.

None encountered.

We use several solutions. We determine what is best for the customer and present them with the solutions we believe fit their needs best.

Do an analysis of what you need. Weigh the pros and cons of each solution and use what is going to work best for you.

Key feature for me is the ability to test recovery plans with zero impact to the production running environment, this is key for 'what-if’ type analysis and to provide confidence that the platform can be recovered with minimal intervention.

Organisations that have implemented SRM in my experience have confidence that their mission critical systems will be recovered within the given SLA in the event of a planned or unplanned availability event. This avoids costly and time consuming DR recovery tests which are also often unrepresentative of the real scenario.

Smaller sites or sites with mixed storage platforms rely on vSphere replication for DR purposes so additional scalability in this tool would benefit from this.

I have designed and implemented 3 solutions with this product over the last 3 years.

No issues

More around vSphere replication than SRM

No issues encountered.

VMware Tech Support is excellent.

For VMware environments there is no other option for integrated/automated DR other than 'roll your own.'

SRM setup is straight forward, SRA (storage integration) can be more complex depending on the array in question.

I was working for the vendor.

Consider your storage design and replication policy first and as always make sure you review VMware documentation and HCL for compatibility.

The automatic activation of the storage volumes and bringing up all VM’s. The recovery plans and resource mapping are good features.

With the resource mapping we can use different networks to bring up our VM’s

We can easily create a test environment with the SRM testing functionality, also in combination with EMC recoverpoint we can start up a virtual machine to a given point in time.

Automatic guest customizations through a GUI is a missing feature. Also the new version of SRM is web-only and is not that stable as the old client version.

We had couple of times that the web interface crashed and needed to restart the services.

7 years.

No issues encountered.

No, but the new web client is sometime ‘buggy.'

No issues encountered.

We needed to use customer service a couple of times while upgrading versions but all went fine.

8/10

No previous solution used.

It wasn't complex.

We used a vendor team and their expertise was good.

This product makes it easy for us to have a managed DR. Also the point in time functionality to bring up vm’s is a cost-saving method for us during the upgrade / testing period.

No other options evaluated.

Read and follow the admin guide, otherwise when you miss a step you can search long time. Also use the correct storage adapter of your storage vendor.

Disaster recovery of a failed site.

None, I implement this product for customers.

Storage integration.

5 years.

The integration (SRA’s) with storage and it’s versions.

None encountered.

None encountered.

9 out of 10.

9 out of 10.

Just a regular backup product. But this wasn't a disaster recovery solution.

A SRM implementation is not difficult. Getting the business requirements is more of a challenge.

I was the implementor.

For most customers about 2 years.

I don’t know as it depends on the customer.

Nope, I was asked to implement this solution.

Know your business requirements.

Instant VMware integration and a wide integration with storage vendors.

The company was able to provide customers with the required RPO that was not possible with traditional backup solutions.

Stability, speed.

4 years.

Bugs bugs bugs...

Sometimes the vm would not failover.

No backwards compatibility of different versions, this made scaling a bit difficult as we needed to upgrade existing infrastructure all the time.

3/10, VMware support was not really proficient in the product, as most of the time we would give them the solution.

3/10, VMware support was not really proficient in the product, as most of the time we would give them the solutio

No.

The integration with EMC recoverpoint was problematic in the beginning, with vm's not failing over all the time and slow recover times.

Yes, Zerto, Veeam.

POC and test.

Centralized recovery plans for thousands of VMs, Non-disruptive recovery testing, Automated DR workflows.

Lowers the cost of DR management, Eliminates clexity and risk of manual processes, Enables fast and highly predictable RTOs.

In my opinion if Vmware added some function to detect the business critical applications like oracle, exchange to help monitor these applications for disaster recovery .

7 years on many international projects.

In the earlier versions I had some issue, however all of them resolved now.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Excellent, I had some issues for trouble shooting which was far from my knowledge and vmware customer service remotely solved the problem.

Excellent

Yes, I used other products like Storage replications or some other software like "double take.” The problem with storage replication was that it was so risky and unstable to manually bring the application up on DR site, besides taking more time to restore.

Other software, like double take, we needed to do lot of effort on each application separately which makes the solution more complex.

In some basic installations, it is very straightforward, but for enterprise customers it makes sense to do some extra steps to protect applications and boot order.

Both, In my experience vendor teams like HP, EMC or net app, didn’t have much experience with this product, especially for the last 5 years, I mainly have to help them understand the solution.

Based on average of downtime cost on DR and how automation can help to bring the business on, SRM can reduce the cost nearly 50 percent; moreover you don’t need to have SAN storage on DR.

Setup cost was based on number of vms and protection plan, and if communication DR site has no any issue, within two weeks all setup can normally be finished and cost is around $300- $350 per day.

For some customer who want to protect small number of of applications, I will recommend to go with vendor disaster recovery solution, like Oracle data guard for oracle DB or Microsoft exchange replication or SQL log shipping for Microsoft SQL products.

Vmware SRM can handle all of the challenge of replication and disaster recovery in a simple way.

Ability to support DR.

We have a fully functioning DR environment.

The setup documentation needs to be improved greatly.

Only the fact that I had scour the Internet to find the proper setup information.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Average.

Well the tech I spoke to did not know how the setup should be implemented, until I found the literature myself.

Did not use a previous solution.

Complex - settings for the sql db were not documented - had to search a lot for those.

I implemented the product.

Very good - we have a DR platform that we've tested with a live production workflow.

No others were evaluated.

Gather the proper setup information.