SRM 5 with vSphere Replication is generally available starting September 14th! For those of you who are waiting to get your hands on the product, it is now available for download and evaluation.
For those of you who are existing SRM customers looking to upgrade, you need to be patient for a few more days until the new licenses are available on the portal, which is targeted for September 17th.
The entire SRM team is very excited about this release – judging by the attendance and questions we received at VMworld earlier this month a lot of you are too, and with good reason. This is by far the most significant product release for SRM since its initial introduction three years ago. With SRM 5, we provide the most cost-effective DR, protect more applications and sites, support planned migrations in a more automated fashion, and offer an easier entry cost for our smaller accounts with a tiered pricing model.
The new release also enables DR to the Cloud, which is a great way for organizations with only one site to get DR protection without the cost associated with building and maintaining a second datacenter just for DR purposes.
One key highlight of the release was blogged about earlier but is worth noting again:
vSphere Replication is the industry’s first and only hypervisor-based replication product, bundled with SRM 5 at no additional cost. It enables you to replicate virtual machines between sites using the capabilities of the ESXi platform itself, without relying on storage-based replication. By eliminating replication costs, you may be able to cut your protection costs significantly, and protect many more applications and sites.
