Site Recovery Manager

Site Recovery Manager 5.0 (SRM) pairs data center sites and provides replication and disaster recovery (DR) for VMware virtual infrastructure.

vSphere Replication (VR), shown in the lower right, is a new feature in SRM 5.0 and enables DR without requiring more expensive, hardware array-based replication.

This test configured VR to run with a relatively generous four-hour recovery point objective that reduced network and system resource use, but created a greater exposure on the ability to recover the system.

Protection groups are collections of virtual machines and templates that are used to help determine how the recovery plan will work.

Priority Groups determine the restart order and can include dependencies.

VM IP address assignments can be handled by SRM according to rules included in the recovery plan.

Live action status shows the overall progress of the recovery plan.

The Recovery Plan history report shows what happened at each step of a recovery plan run.

Planned migration is a new feature of SRM that can run a recovery plan, but will gracefully stop if an error is encountered.

The live action recovery screen shows that the planned migration is going according to plan.

Once a disaster recovery operation is initiated, the process permanently alters both VMs and the virtual infrastructure, and thus requires additional confirmation before SRM will begin execution.