A short posting this time, but something that is coming up a lot at the moment. The question is "Can I protect VMs that reside on vSphere Storage Appliance datastores with Site Recovery Manager 5.0?".
The answer is yes you can. Virtual machines that reside on the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) can be protected by SRM 5.0 using vSphere Replication (VR). VSA does not require a Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) to work with SRM 5.0. This statement will appear shortly in the SRM 5.0 Release Notes. For more about SRM 5.0 & the new vSphere Replication feature, have a read of this blog article.
Here is a screen shot of me successfully protecting a VM using vSphere Replication. This resides on an NFS datastore in a VSA cluster. In this example, it is being replicated to a local datastore on an ESXi 5.0 server at a remote site:
This screenshot shows the initial synchronization of the VM, including the datastore details. VSADs-1 is an NFS datastore in the VSA Cluster:
It works just fine and is fully supported. There is one consideration however, and that is the vSphere licenses. While we are aiming the VSA at our small to medium businesses, and doing some special offers with Essentials+ bundling the VSA, the lowest license tier which supports SRM is Standard. Just keep that in mind if you are planning a solution using the VSA 1.0 & SRM 5.0 products.
Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following me on Twitter: VMwareStorage
VMware VSA Support
Virtual machines that reside on the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) can be
protected by SRM 5.0 using vSphere Replication (VR).
VSA does not require a Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) to work with SRM
