Josh's Blog

The long-awaited release of VMware Site Recovery Manager 4 is finally upon us.  Many have been holding their upgrade plans to vSphere4 until this release of Site Recovery Manager.  In this release, VMware customers start to see a single pane of glass into their Virtual Datacenter using the linked vCenters feature within vCenter4 and Site Recovery Manager.  VMware View 4 will be the next major product offering from VMware to follow.

NFS Support

SRM 4 now offers full support for NFS storage systems.  Previously only the iSCSI and Fiber Channel guys could use SRM’s ease of DR capabilities, well now the NFS guys can reap the benefits of site to site failover.  Here is a link to certified storage systems for Site Recovery Manager 4.

Support for Shared Recovery Sites

You can now take multiple data centers and create disaster plans into one location.  Not all organizations have just two datacenters; a majority of companies have Datacenters dispersed throughout the country that you can now fail individually.  The other scenario is if you have multiple vCenter servers within the same geographic region or even in the same physical space you can now have disaster plans for both, up to ten shared recovery sites are supported.

Full Compatibility with DPM (Distributed Power Management)

Distributed Power Management (DPM) is a VMware mechanism that manages power consumption by ESX hosts.  When DPM and DRS are enabled on a recovery site cluster, SRM temporarily disables DPM for the cluster and ensures that all hosts in the cluster are powered on before recovery begins. After failing back to the primary site DPM is then enabled again at the recovery site.  The advantage is that if you are in DR facility and charged per kilowatt you can prevent being charged for power not be used and also helping the environment by not wasting energy resources.
 
Automated Failback

My personal favorite and one I believe everyone has been asking for is finally here: the ability to hit the big red button to fail to your recovery site, then flip your script and replication and be prepared to failback when needed.  After a recovery plan has been run and the virtual machines are operating at the recovery site, you can reconfigure Site Recovery Manager and run a failback procedure—this migrates the same virtual machines within your recovery plan back to the primary site and prepares both sites for the next recovery or test.
 
So in summary, VMware has continued to build Site Recovery Manager 4 and has listened to their customers by adding new features. If you want to read more about new features of Site Recovery Manager 4 follow this link.