Today I’m pleased to have a guest author for the uptime blog: Gil Haberman. Gil is the Product Marketing Manager for business continuity products at VMware, and he wants to highlight a couple of very exciting accomplishments for SRM. Here’s Gil:
Happy New Year folks!
It’s been a remarkable year for vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and we open 2013 with plenty of exciting news: First, SRM has passed the 10,000 customers mark and we are excited to see accelerated adoption around the world and across all customer segments. In addition, SRM has just won The 2013 Virtualization Review Reader’s Choice Award for Business Continuity. We learned about this award a few weeks after SRM won the 2012 Windows IT Pro Community Choice Award for Best High Availability Product.
We value these awards because they reflect the choice of so many readers and customers who evaluated different options and selected SRM as the market-leading disaster recovery management product. vCenter Site Recovery Manager ensures the simplest, most affordable and reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. It leverages cost-efficient vSphere Replication or storage-based replication to provide centralized management of recovery plans, enable non-disruptive testing, and automate site recovery and migration processes.
Disaster recovery is a form of insurance – its sole purpose is to protect you when a disaster happens. And just like good insurance, the best disaster recovery should provide great protection, with minimum hassle, at the lowest possible cost. IT organizations need to expand disaster protection to cover a broader range of applications and smaller sites, but are looking for better ways to implement disaster recovery. The ideal disaster recovery solution should be affordable, simple to manage and highly reliable.
Simple management of centralized recovery plans – Traditional recovery plans are complex to set up. They must ensure the end-to-end recovery of entire business services, involving a large number of individual steps that must be coordinated across application instances, hosts, network, and storage. These recovery plans are usually captured in complicated runbooks, which are unfortunately error-prone and quickly fall out of sync with configuration changes.
With Site Recovery Manager, setting up a recovery plan is simple and can be done in a matter of minutes, instead of the weeks required to set up manual runbooks. Through an interface that is tightly integrated with vCenter, the user simply selects which virtual machines to protect, maps virtual machines to resources at the recovery site, and specifies the virtual machine boot sequence.
Site Recovery Manager shields the users from having to manage many of the steps required for traditional recovery. For example, SRM automatically manages recovery steps at the storage and replication layers through tight integration provided by Storage Replication Adapters. SRM coordinates activities such as starting and stopping replication, and presenting LUNs and virtual machines to vSphere. vSphere also simplifies disaster recovery by encapsulating the entire virtual machine, including the Operating System, application binaries, and application data in a single set of files. By replicating those files to the failover site, the entire virtual machine can be recovered automatically by SRM in a fast single-step process, eliminating the need to recover OS, application binaries and data independently.
Site Recovery Manager is often used to fulfill compliance requirements for disaster recovery. The recovery plan itself can be used to demonstrate that disaster protection is in place. And the outcome of recovery testing can be used to demonstrate that RTO objectives can be met.
Fully tested and automated execution of recovery plans and site migration – Traditional disaster recovery has a reputation for being unreliable and often fails to meet the required Recovery Point Objectives (RPO – defined as the acceptable length of data loss in the event of a disaster) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO – defined as the acceptable length of time required for recovery) in the event of a disaster. It relies extensively on unpredictable manual processes, which are themselves documented in error-prone runbooks. Many organizations are unable to perform routine failover testing because it impacts production systems, must be performed during off-hours, and often cannot be completed during the assigned time window. As a result, actual Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives seldom meet uptime requirements.
Site Recovery Manager automates the entire site recovery and migration process. Upon initiating a disaster failover, business services are automatically recovered with limited or no manual intervention. By eliminating the risk inherent to manual processes, disaster failover can be executed much faster and with highly predictable RTOs. Typical RTO times vary between 30 minutes to a couple of hours, depending on the actual configuration.
With Site Recovery Manager, failover testing can be performed as frequently as required and is non-disruptive to production systems. Organizations are able to quickly identify any problems with recovery plans to enable fast resolution, for example when a new configuration change is incompatible with the existing plan and requires an adjustment. Site Recovery Manager provides a detailed report of the test outcomes, including the RTO achieved. With this information, organizations gain the confidence that their disaster protection will meet their business objectives, and can spend less time worrying about disaster recovery.
In addition to disaster recovery, Site Recovery Manager is often used to simplify and automate planned site migrations. For example, some organizations routinely migrate their applications between sites for infrastructure maintenance, or for global load balancing. Site Recovery Manager has two unique capabilities designed to streamline this process: ‘Automated Failback’ and ‘Planned Migration’. ‘Automated Failback’ enables the migration of applications from the second site back to the original site using the initial recovery plan. With this capability, applications can move back and forth between sites automatically, without having to set up a new recovery plan for each step. The ‘Planned Migration’ capability ensures clean site migrations of virtual machines in an application-consistent state and with zero data loss. Production virtual machines are shut down gracefully, all the storage IO cashes are flushed to disk, and replication is completed prior to initiating the migration process.
Pricing and Packaging – vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1 is available in two editions to help protect virtual environments. Site Recovery Manager Enterprise provides enterprise-level protection to all applications on the vSphere platform. For smaller sites, SRM 5.1 Standard can be used to protect up to 75 virtual machines per site. Organizations with only one site or limited failover capacity can consider VMware’s DR to the Cloud services based on SRM and vSphere Replication. In addition, SRM Enterprise can be purchased as part of vCloud Suite Enterprise.
