Site Recovery Manager VMware Cloud on AWS

Introducing VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.2

When ride sharing apps first became available, they reduced a lot of the complexity involved with getting a ride, such as how the driver and passenger find each other, payment automation, and navigation to the destination. As a result, customers saved money and gained convenience and flexibility. Ride sharing apps also introduced security and safety features that allowed passengers to broadcast their location and reduced the risk of payment fraud. The result of that was increased usage of modern transportation in developing countries. Similarly, the new versions of VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and vSphere Replication simplify disaster recovery (DR) and provide more security for customers’ DR plans. These new capabilities make DR more accessible to customers.

 

SRM automates and orchestrates recovery plans to minimize downtime in case of disasters, by integrating with an underlying replication technology. This reduces any manual effort required during failover, failback, and network mapping. Additionally, SRM enables customers to conduct non-disruptive testing of their DR plans, to ensure that their Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) are met. VMware vSphere Replication provides hypervisor-based virtual machine replication. It protects virtual machines from partial or complete site failures by replicating the virtual machines, regardless of the underlying storage array, from a primary site to a secondary site, between two clusters in a single site, and from multiple source sites to a single target site.

 

New and Exciting Benefits

 

SRM 8.2 simplifies DR management and increases security with a Photon OS-based virtual appliance. This new virtual appliance, which can be installed directly from vCenter, reduces layers of complexity associated with Windows Server VMs by leveraging a new operating system purpose-built for only DR functions. We’ve simplified DR even more by introducing additional automation with new SRM API methods and new workflows to the vRealize Orchestrator plug-ins for SRM and vSphere Replication. There is a new vRealize Operations management pack for vSphere Replication and the SRM management pack has been enhanced which increases visibility into the status of your DR protection, RPO violations and more. Last but not least from a UI standpoint, our new Dark Mode user interface reduces strain on your eyes.

 

VMware Site Recovery Manager

 

Data can now be protected in-flight with new vSphere Replication support for network traffic encryption. Additionally, the replication and protection of Encrypted VMs is now supported by both SRM 8.2 and vSphere Replication 8.2. Also new to SRM 8.2, you can now consolidate logs and validate your security configurations with syslog server support. Finally, the configuration Import/Export function introduced in 8.1, is now available directly from the SRM user interface.

 

Look for more details on all of these great new features in the next week!

 

Ecosystem Support

 

SRM naturally integrates with VMware’s entire SDDC stack, including vSphere, vSAN, and NSX. In fact, customers that use vSAN and SRM can manage both their storage and their DR using a single Policy-based Management system.

 

Other customers prefer to use storage arrays, so these new capabilities are supported by a very broad storage ecosystem. SRM 8.2 compatible Storage replication adapters (SRAs) are currently developed/released by Dell-EMC Unity, RecoverPoint, XtremeIO , HPE 3PAR and Nimble, Hitachi Vantara, IBM Spectrum Virtualize Family Storage, Pivot3, and Pure Storage, with more storage partners joining in the future. See for yourself how excited they are:

 

Let’s start with Rich Vining, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Hitachi Vantara, who says: “Hitachi Data Instance Director is highly integrated with the VMware ecosystem to deliver modern data protection and copy data management services, including orchestration between VMware Site Recovery Manager and Hitachi remote replication technologies to meet requirements for high availability, business continuity, and long-distance disaster recovery.”

 

According to Eric Siebert, WW Product Manager at HPE Storage, “VMware SRM plays a critical role with our customers looking to protect mission-critical workloads running on HPE 3PAR and Nimble Storage in VMware environments. Our enterprise customers look to SRM to simplify their BC/DR plans and we’re excited to have day 0 support for SRM 8.2 which will even further streamline their operations.  At HPE we have a long history of close collaboration with VMware on key storage technologies such as VVols and SRM which enables our customers to immediately benefit from using the latest storage innovations in vSphere.”

 

Mike Koponen, Senior Director of Product and Solutions Marketing at Pivot3 says that their customers expect to “simplify their most mission-critical IT deployments, [Pivot3 is] excited to be an early partner supporting VMware SRM 8.2. This integration extends [Pivot3’s] policy-based approach to managing workloads and it is one of the areas where [Pivot3 sees] containers simplifying how IT services are deployed and consumed.”

 

“Site Recovery Manager is one of the very first VMware solutions Pure Storage integrated with so we are thrilled to see continued innovation and enhancement of the product by VMware. SRM is a critical piece of our customers’ infrastructure management—as we offer them integration to it with both our active-active and our asynchronous replication. We are proud to be day 0 partners on this release so that our joint customers can adopt the latest and greatest offerings from VMware as soon as they need it” says Cody Hosterman, Technical Director at Pure Storage.

 

These are exciting times for anyone thinking of disaster recovery, and with the new capabilities of SRM and vSphere replication, more customers can protect themselves against downtime.

 

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