BCO3334: Site Recovery Manager Futures

This session covered the future direction for Site Recovery Manager, known as SRM. SRM 5.0 has some major enhancements, and will ship "soon." Among the current and future enhancements are:

• Simple, reliable DR which replaces manual runbooks
• Array integration with a wide range of vendors, currently supporting 28 arrays
• SRM will be able to detect failures, initiate failover, then manage the failover process
• In the future they are looking at single click business continuity
• Enhancements include application mobility where you can establish DR service levels, RPO, RTO, and tiered storage constraints, then tie applications to the defined DR service levels. For example, tier-1 applications could have stringent RPO/RTO requirements, while a tier-2 application could be much more forgiving.
• Multi-site DR is on the road map, so you could enable application mobility across several locations. For example, you could have VMs that "follow the sun" by migrating them to datacenters to take advantage of lower power costs during off hours. Historically SRM was mostly a 1:1 relationship.
• SRM can be used as a datacenter migration tool, not just a tool for DR/BC
• Features new to 5.0 include automated failback, vSphere host-based replication, planned migrations, a totally new GUI, and application consistency.
• SRM can now be used as a disaster avoidance tool, letting you effortlessly migrage workloads from a datacenter in harm's way to one that can sustain operations. Think of weather problems where you have some notice about an impending issue and proactively relocate workloads before a disaster strikes.
• 5.0 also includes history reports, 5 priority groups, and allows inter-VM dependencies to be configured.
• In 2012 a future release will support a cloud DR concept, policy based DR, vMotion anywhere, RTO reduction, support for desktop DR, and per-VM protection with SRAs
• Cloud DR is for private/public clouds where a target could be a cloud DR site, or DR between cloud sites. It may also include a self-service DR portal, and single click DR. Basically DRaaS (DR as a service).
• The speaker also mentioned VMDK encryption, but didn't go into any details.

For anyone that has used SRM 4.x, the 5.0 release is a major update and sorely needed. SRM can take what is a very complex process and provide a high-level of automation. Now that it supports host-based replication, SRM can be used by SMBs that do not have high-end arrays that do LUN-level replication.