Recently there has been a lot of interest in VMware’s Virtual Volumes (vVols) technology as our shared-
storage customers begin to understand the value of deploying vSphere policy-based storage management. As our customers have become more experienced with vVols, many have started to ask how they can
implement business continuance and disaster recovery solutions using vVols and Site Recovery Manager (SRM).
The feedback from our customers and storage partners is clear – the combination of SRM and vVols is critical and could provide virtual infrastructure administrators an efficient way to manage array-based replication with VMware’s Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) and easily orchestrate the recovery and migration of applications with SRM.
We have hence decided to pursue a broader development effort to combine these two technologies, i.e., SRM and vVols. As part of SRM roadmap, we are currently exploring how we can orchestrate recovery of vVols backed virtual machines with SRM.Some of our storage partners such as HP Enterprise 3PAR, HP Enterprise Nimble, and Pure Storage have developed and certified to the latest vVols 2.0 VASA providers specification. vVols 2.0 is part of the vSphere 6.5 release and supports array-based replication with vVol. To support vVols replication operations on these storage arrays, VMware also developed a set of PowerCLI cmdlets so common BC/DR operations such as failover, test failover, and recovery workflows can be scripted as needed. The use of PowerCLI works well for many vVols customers, but we believe many more customers will be able to take advantage of SRM orchestrated BC/DR workflows with vVols.
VMware remains committed to Virtual Volumes development, and we believe with the addition of vVols support in SRM will bring even broader customer deployment of these great products.
