Tucked in the back pocket with all the other big announcements today at VMworld is the availability of vSphere Replication as a standalone option. It is no longer tied to SRM 5.0 as it was originally made available. This is probably to line up with the FUD that Microsoft has been pushing with their Hyper-V replica being free.
What this means is that small shops will have a way to protect their virtual servers on a per VM basis rather than on a entire datastore/LUN basis. This does not offer in of the fancy logic and auto recovery options that SRM gives you but if you need some base level replication and you don’t have any array based options. Then this should make you pretty happy. Bellow is the announcement from VMware.
vSphere Replication was introduced with SRM 5.0 as a means of protecting VM data using our in-hypervisor software based replication. It was part of SRM 5.0, and continues to be, carrying forward, but now we are offering the ability to use this technology in a new fashion.
Today’s announcement about vSphere Replication is a big one: We have decoupled it from SRM and released it as an available feature of every vSphere license from Essentials Plus through Enterprise Plus.
Every customer can now protect their environment, using vSphere Replication as a fundamental feature of the protection of your environment, just like HA.
VR does not include all the orchestration, testing, reporting and enterprise-class DR functions of SRM, but allows for individual VM protection and recovery within or across clusters. For many customers this type of protection is critical and has been difficult to attain short of buying into a full multisite DR solution with SRM. Now most of our customers can take advantage of virtual machine protection and recovery with vSphere Replication.
Check out an introduction to vSphere Replication at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Introduction-to-vSphere-Replication.pdf
About Brian
Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status for 2012 & 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design
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