VMware to release SRM 4.0 today
Today VMware will release the Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0. Although it’s predecessor was SRM 1.0, the step to 4.0 is not that big as it looks, skipping 2.0 and 3.0 is merely to streamline the product version with vSphere 4.0 and make it easy to know which products are compatible to each other. With SRM 4.0, it is now fully supported to connect to a vSphere 4.0 environment. It is possible to mix ESX4, ESX 3.5 and ESX 3.03 (or higher) hosts, but they have to be managed by vCenter 4.
Some of the new features and enhancements:
- Like mentioned above, now works with vCenter 4 and vSphere 4.
- Can work with replicated NFS stores
- It is possible to do a many to one site recovery
- In the many to one scenario, you can have multiple SRM’s pair to one destination SRM.
- VMs protected by Fault Tolerant will also fail over to the DR site, the VM is not re-protected however afterwards.
- Distributed vSwitches will be failed over to DR site.
- The number of protected VMs has been increased from 500 to 1000 VMs.
- With Linked-Mode support it is now easy to see all your SRM protected sites and your DR site in one vCenter Client.
All vendors that were on the SRM 1.0 HCL will have to recertify their agents to work with the new SRM 4.0, but right now many of them have already concluded this process and the last few will finish probably by the end of the month.
I have not been part of the beta, so I have no experience with SRM 4.0 yet but from what I’ve heard, especially the many to one recovery sound real good. This will offer you the option to have just one DR site standby to recover one or more sites. Seems like a great option for branch offices.
Pricing hasn’t changed and will remain to be a $1750.- US dollar per CPU socket.
Links:
- SRM 4. Release notes – http://www.vmware.com/support/srm/srm_releasenotes_4_0.html
- Site Recovery Manger download – http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_downloads/vmware_vcenter_site_recovery_manager/4_0