Yesterday VMware announced the GA of Site Recovery Manager 5.8. There are a number of great additions and improvements and I’m going to cover them here briefly.
Full Web Client Integration
The most visible change is that SRM 5.8 is fully integrated as a plug-in with the vSphere Web Client. In addition to not having to use two different interfaces to manage your environment improvements were also made to a few workflows making it easier and simpler to map arrays, networks, folders, etc by having SRM handle the reciprocal instead of having to do it manually.
Scale
Thanks to close collaboration between engineering teams and significant work reducing or eliminating a number of small issues SRM 5.8 now supports up to 5,000 protected (up from 1,500 in SRM 5.5) and up to 2,000 simultaneously recoverable VMs (up from 1,500 in SRM 5.5). Keep in mind these aren’t hard limits. SRM won’t stop you from exceeding them, and may keep working fine, however you won’t be using a supported configuration.
Performance
SRM engineers also focused significant energy on improving performance in SRM 5.8 and made huge strides as evidenced by the following test:
2000 VMs, 250 protection groups, IP customization for all VMs
That is more than a 75% decrease in time required for the storage portion and more than a 50% decrease in the total time of the recovery plan. I’ll dig into more details of these improvements in a future post.
vCO plug-in/vCAC integration
Along with the release of SRM 5.8 we are also releasing a vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for SRM. This plug-in enables simpler, tenant-driven provisioning of predefined DR protection tiers to new VMs, independently or via bluprints in vCAC. It makes it possible to automate the provisioning steps in vCAC to include DR configuration.
If the portal user selects, for example, a priority group, vCloud Automation Center in combination with vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.8 and the vCenter Orchestrator plug-in will place the provisioned virtual machine on replicated storage and add it to the relevant protection group placed within the appropriate recovery plan. This reduces administrative overhead and provides a faster, more seamless experience to customers using vCloud Automation Center as their provisioning portal. Look for more posts on the details of this soon.
IP subnet mapping SRM 5.8 provides the ability to map IP subnets using IP customization rules in addition to the existing customization of individual IP addresses. This provides the ability to map subnets (eg. 10.10.10.x to 192.168.1.x) and have vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.8 manage the change of the network portion of the address while maintaining the host portion. It is configured as part of the network mapping process so when new VMs are added to an existing map, subnet mapping is applied automatically.
Embedded database option
To simplify installation and ongoing maintenance SRM 5.8 offers the option during installation of utilizing an embedded vPostgres database. This database fully supports the complete range and scale of SRM 5.8 environments.
Supported Storage Replication Adapters
SRM 5.8 supports the same Storage Replication Adapters (SRAs) as SRM 5.5 so there is no need to wait for SRAs to be re-certified to take advantage of the SRM 5.8 improvements.
SRM 5.8 provides the ability to map IP subnets using IP customization rules in addition to the existing customization of individual IP addresses. This provides the ability to map subnets (eg. 10.10.10.x to 192.168.1.x) and have vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.8 manage the change of the network portion of the address while maintaining the host portion. It is configured as part of the network mapping process so when new VMs are added to an existing map, subnet mapping is applied automatically.
