VMware SRM Reviews & Insights

Score9 out of 10

32 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for VMware Site Recovery Manager are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Easy Configuration and Execution: Reviewers have found VMWare SRM to be very easy to configure and execute, even for those who are not virtualization experts. This indicates that the product offers a user-friendly interface and does not require extensive technical knowledge to set up.

Multiple Protection Groups and Recovery Plans: Several users mentioned the helpfulness of having multiple protection groups and recovery plans in VMWare SRM. This feature allows users to implement recovery priorities and partial or full site recovery based on their specific needs, providing greater control over their disaster recovery processes.

Automated Replication Management: Users appreciate the automated replication management in VMWare SRM. The software takes care of replication from the failover site to the old primary site without requiring any additional tasks, making the disaster recovery process streamlined and time-saving.

VMware SRM Reviews

7 Reviews

VMware SRM - the must-have tool for disaster recovery

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 12, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our department uses vCenter SRM to utilize an off site failover of our VM's. In case of a disaster VMware SRM has proven year after year to satisfy our annual audits of testing our failover procedures. Critical applications such as Exchange, SQL, Oracle, IIS, and others have all been tested and the fallback procedures that SRM has are seamless.

Pros

Easy configuration and setup.
Testing of a particular VM or datastore with several VMs is easy.
Auto configuration of IPs makes the process even easier.

Cons

The upgrade process can use a little fine tuning.
The use of SRM being on an appliance instead of only running on Windows is needed as well.

Likelihood to Recommend

SRM is a must-have tool if your business requires you to failover your VMs to a disaster recovery site and provide valid testing and real-time numbers. Our VP office is always amazed at how easily we are able to satisfy our annual testing and show actual results with time stamps and the sequence of each VM that is up and running.

SRM may not be needed in a very small business that does not have the capacity nor the need to have their infrastructure off site in a form of a disaster recovery site.

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Easy Peasy Site Recovery

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

November 29, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently hosting around 80 VMs on Production Site vCenter and 120 VMs on Non-Production Site vCenter. We use SRM to perform our bi-yearly disaster recovery drills for the virtual layer. We have been extremely please with the ease of configuring SRM and performing site recovery. Initially, we hired an SRM expert to do the job for us, but now our system admins are also able to perform the site recovery.
We have used VMware Site Recovery Manager for both failover and failback exercises without any issues. I like the way we can create multiple protection groups to facilitate recovery of virtual machines based on priority.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's quite well suited for a medium to large size VMWare virtualization infrastructure where your production infrastructure can be failed over to a disaster recovery site. There are other cheaper options for a smaller budget business. Also, for a non mission critical virtual infrastructure, you can simply use VM backups such as Veeam backups for restoring failed VMs.

Ravinder Gupta

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

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

SRM - not what it used to be...

Rating: 1 out of 10

November 6, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SRM was compared against Veeam as the tool of choice for our virtual disaster recovery tool across our organization.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

SRM is a good tool for a quick DR failover to a remote site.

Alejandro Contreras

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

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

A good choice for a 100% VMware environments.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 28, 2018

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

Likelihood to Recommend

All the vmware environments need a DRM to automate they DR process, its a must to save the cost of a total downtime for the enterprise.

Carlos Daniel Casañas Bertolo ஃ

Director in Information Technology at Leverage - Advisory & Consultancy (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

SRM - a newbies point of view

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 11, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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".

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Dan Forlano

Supervisor LAN Support in Information Technology at CONMED Corporation (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

DR Automation with VMware Site Recovery Manager

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 5, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VMware Site Recovery Manager has been used to set up disaster recovery on all Tier 1 application servers. It is used across the whole organization. It address the issue of any failure or outage on [our] primary data center.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

VMs require to club into one ESX cluster for easy set up and disaster recovery, that point I don't like.

Abhishek Thakor

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

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

Automated Disaster Recovery

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 5, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VMware is used on all our Tier 1 applications for high availability and business continuity for quick recovery. VMware simplifies the whole process of configuration and management.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware courses are recommended, so make sure technical staff are properly trained first.

Kunal Gupta

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

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Loading Reviews List....

SRM - not what it used to be...

Rating: 1 out of 10

November 6, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SRM was compared against Veeam as the tool of choice for our virtual disaster recovery tool across our organization.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

SRM is a good tool for a quick DR failover to a remote site.

Alejandro Contreras

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

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile