SRM 5.8

At VMWorld 2014 VMware announced vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.8.

One of the main features this brings is full integration with the vSphere Web Client. Previous versions required the c# client. This has held people back from moving to the Web Client as they had to use the old c# client to perform any SRM work and therefore stuck with that client. This integration may encourage more people to move to the web client.

VMware have improved the recovery performance by reducing the time it takes performing storage tasks. The figures provided by VMware are that an environment with the following

• 2000 protected VMs
• 250 protection groups
• IP customisation of all VMs

would take the following length of time to perform a recovery to the protected site

As you can see the vast majority of the time savings are in the storage tasks.

Another time saving feature is that now, with SRM 5.8, when you are configuring inventory mappings you have the option to create the reverse mapping, e.g. if you are creating a resource pool mapping from Site-A to Site-B then you can tick a box to get SRM to create the reverse mapping for the resource pool from Site-B to Site-A. This is required if you want bi-directional recovery and for fail-back.

There is also a new IP customisation method where you can map a subnet from the Protected Site to a subnet at the Recovery Site and get SRM to change the IP addresses for you without you having to configure individual VMs. For example you could map 192.168.10.0/24 from the Protected Site to 192.168.20.0/24 at the Recovery Site and SRM would change the IP addresses of the VMs from a 192.168.10.x address to a 192.168.20.x address keeping the last octet of the IP address the same, e.g. changing 192.168.10.55 to 192.168.20.55.

The supported number of protected VMs and concurrent recoveries has been increased in SRM 5.8 as follows: –

These limits are not enforced and you can actually configure more, however VMware will only support the above configurations.

To be able to use SRM 5.8 you will need to be running vCenter 5.5 Update 2 at both sites. Your ESXi servers can be running any version from 4.0 upwards (including ESX 4.x).

For new SRM 5.8 implementations there is an option to use an embedded vProgres database so you no longer have to rely on a SQL or Oracle database.

I have heard a rumour that there is currently a known issue with SRM 5.8 that if your vCenter servers are configured in Linked Mode then if one of them is unavailable you are unable to perform a recovery. The work around for this is that you disable Linked Mode. So if you are using vCenter servers in Linked Mode then you might want to take this into account. I’m sure that if this is correct then there will be a patch to rectify this issue very soon.