Today VMware releases one of the most wanted product in its growing portfolio: Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 1.0 (build 97878).
This is the second company’s attempt to enter the security market: VMware started with Assured Computing Environment (ACE), which could represent an effective endpoint security solution but had very acceptance.
With SRM VMware moves to disaster recovery but differently from ACE, this product is not a security solution that can be used in any environment. SRM is a DR solution for VMware Infrastructure only.
SRM 1.0 comes as a VirtualCenter 2.5 plug-in and allows VMware customers to design, test and execute a seamless migration of virtual machines from the production site to the recovery site and vice versa (if you want SRM to bi-directionally protect both sites).
The product allows to define virtual machines groups with different recovery priorities (including non-essential VMs which just stay off), the single VMs restart order, and the SLA for recovered VMs.
Additionally, SRM takes care of which site is in read/write state and which is in read-only state during the whole process.
Obviously virtualization makes the implementation of a recovery site a much cheaper project, but the real selling point of SRM is that customers can actually test the DR plan.
Verifying a disaster recovery plan is a very expensive and time consuming task, and it interrupts the services availability.
Since the mission critical services are the ones that should be tested, only some companies really try their recovery procedures. The others simulate them on bogus or secondary services which makes the whole test useless.
SRM instead allows to test the recovery plan on the entire data center without down times.
To make the whole thing possible SRM coordinates a block replication between storage arrays at both sites, and this implies that each storage vendor produces a plug-in, Storage Replication Adapter or SRA, to makes the equipment SRM-aware:
At the release date five storage firms SRM: Dell EqualLogic, EMC, FalconStor, LeftHand Networks and NetApp.
VMware created an architecture which allows the vendors to certify and support their SRAs in autonomy, so that the adoption process for customers is much faster.
The price for SRM alone is $2,187.50 per processor, including 1 year Platinum support, which implies to buy at least two licenses.
On top of that customers have to buy two VI 3.5 licenses if they are not already available and obviously the supported shared storage at both sites.
Download a trial here.
The virtualization Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.