VMware Site Recovery Manager reaches Release Candidate 1 status

The most-wanted new disaster recovery solution from VMware, Site Recovery Manager (SRM), originally announced in September 2007, just reached the Release Candidate status (build 85007).

Mike Laverick provided some details about how SRM works:

The replication of the VM is not being done by VMware but by your SAN, iSCSI or NAS vendors replication technology. SiteA can protect SiteB, and SiteB can protect SiteA.

The Vi-Client has a plug-in extension that speaks to the SRM Service – and orchestrates the whole process. Creating “Protection Groups” (groups of VMs you need to have DR for) which are very closely linked to “LUN Groups” (where their storage is located). The SRM plug-in handles the “mapping” of Virtualcenter object in the VC environment in SiteA to SiteB such as folder and reasource location…

VMware continues to keep the beta program private but announced that the product will be released in Q2 2008.