VMware Cloud Director vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

For a CSP it's the best choice. For internal uses, even in presence of different business units, it's not so easy and flexible to manage. It assures a high level of multitenancy, often not needed for internal purposes. But it could be used in this case, just not created for these purposes. Network management is great.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Manages multi-tenancy very well. You can setup resource pools of compute, network, and storage that are independent of each other.
• Easy to create and manage multiple environments.
• Has lease management technology and can easily set leases and expire them based on pre-configured time frames.

Incentivized

• Easy to build a recovery plan
• Easy to test recovery plans
• Works with storage based replication or non storage based replication

• Logging, there is a lot of logging but is not always clear where to look for the right logging.
• The syncing of policy, you can't see if or what he did/didn't sync and the status of it.
• More integrations with VMware product (click like Availability)

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

- easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster

Incentivized

VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.

Incentivized

Sometimes we have to struggle explaining the problem and getting it resolved on priority. The overall quality of support team is not as good as it used to be in past.

Incentivized

Another option was own scripting or maintaining the end users in the backend (vcenter). This costs to much time to maintain (scripting) and has a big change of a Security breach. It was not an option for us either way.

Incentivized

Veeam Backup & Replication is slower than VMWare SRM and doesn't suits our RTO (Recovery Time Objective).

Incentivized

• vCloud Director requires less IT administration. For example, there isn't a need to maintain esx host. or storage administration like creating luns.
• A negative impact is cost. vCloud Director has a monthly cost for storage, processor core, memory, and licensing.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized