With the new version 5.0 release, VMware has expanded the capabilities of Site Recovery Manager to provide unprecedented levels of protection. The following are among the significant improvements in Site Recovery Manager 5.0 over 4.1:
• Completely new user interface
Includes the ability to manage both protected and recovery sites from one interface, as well as more intuitive graphical representations of protected objects, without linked mode.
• vSphere Replication
vSphere Replication is a VMware proprietary replication engine that copies only changed blocks to the recovery site, ensuring both lower bandwidth utilization and more aggressive recovery point objectives compared with manual, full-system copies of virtual machines. It offers Parallel operation with array-based replication via storage replication adaptors to enable tiered replication offerings.
• Increased scalability
Site Recovery Manager 5.0 has introduced some changes to the scalability limits of previous versions, offering a larger ceiling of protected systems per instance.
• Planned migration
Prior to Site Recovery Manager 5.0, workflow capabilities included both execution and testing of a recovery plan. With version 5.0, VMware has introduced a new workflow designed to deliver migration from a protected site to a recovery site through execution of a planned migration workflow. Planned migration ensures an orderly and pretested transition from a protected site to a recovery site while minimizing the risk of data loss.
• Re-protection
After a recovery plan or planned migration has run, there are often cases where the environment must continue to be protected against failure, to ensure its resilience or to meet objectives for disaster recovery.
With Site Recovery Manager 5.0, re-protection is a new extension to recovery plans for use only with array-based replication. It enables the environment at the recovery site to establish synchronized replication and protection of the environment back to the original protected site.
• Failback
An automated failback workflow can be run to return the entire environment to the primary site from the secondary site. This will happen after re-protection has ensured that data replication and synchronization have been established to the original site.
• Enhanced dependency definition.
• There is now a faster recovery time if IP customization is required at the recovery site.
• There is now the capability to run callout scripts from within protected virtual machines during a failover.
• There is now the capability to manage the start-up of virtual machines at a more granular level as well as to manage their dependent relationships.
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