During VMworld in Las Vegas last week, VMware announced the availability of version 5 of its disaster recovery tool for vSphere environments, Site Recovery Manager. Site Recovery Manager enables you to build, manage and execute automated distaster recovery plans for your vSphere infrastructure. This version provides support for vSphere 5 which was released at the end of last month.
VMware also announced that some of its partners will provide the SRM functionality in a Software as a Service (SaaS) scenario, partners include FusionStorm, Hosting.com, iland and VeriStor.
Some of the Site Recovery Manager new features:
- vSphere Replication over the network of powered-on virtual machines which copies only changed blocks to the recovery site.
- Scalability increasements, not enforced
- Total number of allowed protected VMs: 1,000
- Number of allowed VMs in a single protection group: 500
- Protection Groups: 250
- Simultaneous running recovery plans: 30
- vSphere Replication protected VMs: 500
- Workflow changes
- Planned Migration, which ensures an orderly and pretested transition from a protected site to a recovery site while minimizing the risk of data loss
- Fallback,which can be run to return the entire environment to the primary site from the secondary site.
- Reprotection, which enables the environment at the recovery site to establish synchronized replication and protection of the environment back to the original protected site
- Redesigned User Interface, providing single UI for protected and recovery site installations
- Support for IPv6
- Enhanced dependency definition, allowing the addition of more priority groups and the ability to set virtual machine dependencies within a priority group