VMware Partner Exchange Highlight Day 1: Site Recovery Manager (Overview)

This morning I was in the very first hands-on lab for VMware’s new product, Site Recovery Manager (SRM). The lab consisted of an Xtreme PC from Chip PC Technology providing an RDP connection to the Protected Site‘s Virtual Center server and the Recovery Site‘s Virtual Center server. It also provided a connection to the Lab Manual in electronic format. Just a word of advice – for many people this may be one of the first times they see VDI in use; therefore, the experience should be favorable. Unfortunately, for all of the labs I attended on Day 1, the VDI’s were awfully sluggish. It’s worth the extra thousands to beef up the infrastructure to make things fly. Perception management.

for many people this may be one of the first time they see VDI in use; therefore, the experience should be favorable.

Worth mentioning here is that the VMware Partner Exchange 2008 is the guinea pig for VMware’s paper-less initiative at future conferences. It was claimed that VMware will save ~$150k by not having to print lab manuals for VMWorld 2008. Kudos to them for perpetuating green concepts and pursuing paper-less opportunities when the situation fits properly. The drawback is that I did not walk away with a lab manual to post screen shots from and I was unable to snag the PDF version of the lab manual.

VMware will save ~$150k by not having to print lab manuals

Positioning and Status.

The current status of SRM is, “feature complete” with a teased potential release date of, “the end of May.” It was stressed that VMware sees SRM as a workflow engine not a mere DR product. SRM is designed to take care of the common tasks like re-signaturing and re-IPing virtual machines, but the engine can be manipulated to many more powerful tasks in pre- and post- scripts. SRM’s marketing pitch is that it turns printed runbooks into automated recovery plans. Finally! As we all know, runbooks generally collect dust and become outdated or simply provide stress-testing for shelf brackets in companies worldwide.

SRM’s marketing pitch is that it turns printed runbooks into automated recovery plans.

The beauty of SRM is partly thanks to additional features in Virtual Center 2.5 , the Plug-In tab. Thanks to this new bit in VC 2.5, SRM is fully integrated into Virtual Center.

Pieces of the SRM Puzzle.

The components of a functioning SRM solution:

Contrary to popular belief in the lab, the SRA needs to be installed on both the Protected Site and Recovery Site SRM servers. The SRA is a piece of software provided by your storage vendor. As VMWare claims, they have worked out an agreement with all supported storage vendor partners to provide the SRA FREE OF CHARGE. However, it should be noted that storage vendors may try to provide add-ons and upsell an SRA product. Good luck.

Below is a diagram of the communication links needed for a functioning SRM environment.

Everybody’s favorite topic: Licensing.

Not surprising, VMware will be charging you for this disaster recovery revolution in the virtualization marketplace. Customers will (obviously) need appropriate licensing for Virtual Center, VI3 hosts and SRM at the Protected Site. In addition, customers will also need valid licenses for a second VC and recovery site VI3 hosts. If a customer only wants to be able to fail in one direction (uni-directional failover), they only need an SRM license at the Protected Site. However, bi-directional failover capabilities will be a strong desire of many organizations and as such, a second SRM license will be required for the Recovery Site.

I’ll be covering the majority of configuration steps in a post to follow shortly.

Posted on May 6, 09:17 PM by Jason Langone

  1. Great stuff! Where’s the rest?

    Jay | May 09, 09:12 PM | #

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  1. Great stuff! Where’s the rest?

    — Jay · May 09, 09:12 PM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.