VMware SRM pros and cons

The solution is very flexible.

The installation and initial setup are straightforward.

VMware's tech support gets a nine-out-of-ten. They are responsive and get you a useful reply.

The stability of SRM has been excellent. It gets a nine-out-of-ten.

This SRM solution can improve your footprint within a data center.

The product functionality is fairly high-quality.

VMware SRM is very effective between two sites with identical twin storage, you can have synchronization between the two sites.

The solution is simple to use and has effective automation.

The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly.

If you want to do failover, it works without any problem.

It is easy to implement for my clients.

The UI is very user-friendly and testing is easy.

Our systems fail over using SRM. So, we do a big bang DR, which is biannual, and we fail over our fairly massive Epic electronic health record (EHR) and our core applications. It takes us about 30 minutes to fail over using SRM, which is pretty good. In most hospitals that have Epic installed, Epic does the audit to make sure that we can fail over if something were to happen. Normally, sites will have a DR solution specific to the EHR, but right now, our pain point is the third-party tier-one clinical applications.

The biggest issue for us is that this product does not have any demo for customers.

The version we are currently using is not the latest and greatest but it has buggy behavior in some browsers.

This product is not appropriate for those moving to a broader cloud footprint.

The technical support is not very good and needs to make an effort to improve.

We have had an issue when some customers have traditional designs and sites. For example, on one another site, they are using hyper-converged, using VMware, or Nutanix. We have a problem with the synchronization between the storage for site to site. This is the main issue. We are adding some other tools to support the synchronization to allow the movement of the workload from site to site easily.

There needs to be better stability during heavy capacity in future releases.

You cannot use VMware SRM in conjunction with storage replication software.

Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers.

I would like to see this solution be more scalable.

Lacks stability and as a result requires continuous monitoring.

We've had configuration issues on occasion. We start to fail over, and then we have to call it off because the configuration is not right, or the data stores aren't configured correctly in the secondary data center. Oftentimes, it is just the experience level of the team, and we have to bring in the vendor to help and validate our configuration.