Now that you have read about our announcement regarding the SRM family and how it allows you to achieve hybrid cloud availability, let’s get into some detail on what’s new with SRM 6.1.
There are three primary new features in SRM 6.1:
- Storage Policy Based Protection Groups (SPPGs)
- Stretched Storage Integration
- Enhanced Integration with VMware NSX
As I imagine you are probably a bit overwhelmed by announcements this week I’ll provide a technical overview of the features now and post individual detailed technical posts on each new feature in the next week or so.
Storage Profile Based Protection (SPPGs)
Storage policy-based protection groups utilize vSphere tags in combination with vSphere storage policy based management to enable automated policy based protection for virtual machines. Storage policy-based management enables vSphere administrators to automate the provisioning and management of virtual machines storage to meet requirements like performance, availability and protection. vSphere tags allow for the ability to attach metadata to vSphere inventory, in this case datastores, which makes these objects more sortable, searchable and possible to associate with storage policies.
Here is how tags and storage-policy based management are used together with storage policy-based protection groups:
- A tag is created and associated with all the datastores in each desired protection group
- A tag based storage policy is created for each protection group utilizing the tag
- A storage policy-based protection group is created and associated with the storage policy
Now, when any virtual machine, new or existing, is associated with that policy and placed on the associated/compatible replicated datastore, SRM protection is automatic. If a virtual machine is disassociated from that policy and/or moved off the datastore it is automatically unprotected. The same happens for datastores and the virtual machines on them.
Leveraging storage profiles to identify protected resources saves time and reduces cost and complexity by eliminating the previously manual operations required to protect and unprotect VMs, and to add and remove datastores from protection groups.
Stretched Storage and Orchestrated vMotion
Prior to SRM 6.1 customers had to make a choice between using SRM or vSphere Metro Storage Clusters/Stretched Storage to provide a multisite solution that was optimized for either site mobility or disaster recovery without being able to attain the benefits of both solutions simultaneously. SRM 6.1 now supports using cross-vCenter vMotion in combination with stretched storage, thereby combining the benefits of SRM with the advantages of stretched storage.
The integration of stretched storage with SRM 6.1 with the ability to orchestrate the live migration of workloads allows customers to achieve what was previously only possible with vSphere Metro Storage Clusters, specifically:
- Planned maintenance downtime avoidance
- Zero-downtime disaster avoidance
