VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

Overview:

VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager makes disaster recovery rapid, reliable and manageable, so that organizations can meet their recovery objectives. Site Recovery Manager delivers centralized management of recovery plans and automates the recovery process. It turns complex paper runbooks associated with traditional disaster recovery into an integrated element of virtual infrastructure management, allowing organizations to improve recovery plan testing dramatically.

Benefits

• Accelerate recovery by automating execution of failover.
• Simplify the creation and management of recovery plans.
• Improve the reliability of recovery plans by simplifying recovery and testing.
• Improve compliance with disaster recovery documentation and testing requirements.

Take the Disaster Out of Disaster Recovery

Easily manage and implement your recovery plan with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

Build, Manage and Execute Reliable Disaster Recovery Plans

As an integrated element of VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager helps you :

• Accelerate recovery for the virtual environment through automation
• Ensure reliable recovery by enabling non-disruptive testing
• Simplify recovery by eliminating complex manual recovery steps and centralizing management of recovery plans

Accelerate Recovery

Ensure that you are able to meet your recovery time objectives (RTOs) by automating the recovery process. 

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager eliminates the slow manual steps of recovery, turning the complex paper runbooks associated with traditional disaster recovery into an integrated part of your virtual infrastructure management. 

Ensure Reliable Recovery

Eliminate common causes of failure during recovery and make it possible to test your recovery plans thoroughly and easily.

By automating recovery, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager eliminates error-prone manual steps in the recovery process and ensures that recovery procedures will be consistently executed as intended.  VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager also makes it easy to execute non-disruptive tests of recovery plans within an isolated testing environment so that you can ensure that they are up to date and will execute successfully.

Simplify Disaster Recovery

Simplify and centralize the process of creating, updating and managing recovery plans.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager guides users through the process of building, managing and executing disaster recovery plans.  It integrates seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure and VMware vCenter Server to make recovery plans significantly easier to manage and update. It also integrates easily with storage replication software from leading storage vendors to simplify the use of advanced replication software with VMware vSphere.

 

 

 

Using VMware Site Recovery Manager:

VMware Site Recovery Manager is a pioneering disaster recovery management and automation solution for VMware vSphere™ 4. Site Recovery Manager accelerates recovery by automating the recovery process and simplifies management of disaster recovery plans by making disaster recovery an integrated element of managing your VMware® virtual infrastructure. Site Recovery Manager also ensures reliable recovery by eliminating complex manual recovery steps and enabling non-disruptive testing of recovery plans.

Site Recovery Manager integrates tightly with VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter Server and storage replication from leading storage vendors to make failover and recovery rapid, reliable, affordable and manageable. It enables organizations to take the risk and worry out of disaster recovery, as well as expand protection to all of their important systems and applications.

How Is VMware Site Recovery Manager Used?

Organizations find it increasingly difficult to provide disaster recovery solutions that meet their needs. Site Recovery Manager helps organizations address the challenges of traditional disaster recovery so that they can meet their recovery time objectives (RTO), recovery point objectives (RPO) and compliance requirements. Using Site Recovery Manager, organizations can manage failover from their production datacenters to disaster recovery sites. They can also manage failover between two sites that both have active workloads and act as recovery sites for each other. Site Recovery Manager can also help with planned datacenter failovers in scenarios such as datacenter migrations, by automating and simplifying the process of failing over to the new datacenter.

Using Site Recovery Manager, organizations can:

Manage disaster recovery plans. Site Recovery Manager allows organizations to create, update and document recovery plans as an integrated part of managing their VMware virtual environment. Traditional solutions for disaster recovery rely on documenting all of the steps and resources required for failover in runbooks that are difficult or impossible to keep accurate and up-to-date. With Site Recovery Manager, the steps and resources that make up the failover process are managed directly from VMware vCenter Server.

Perform non-disruptive tests of failover and recovery. Using Site Recovery Manager, organizations can execute automated tests of their recovery plans without disrupting their environment. Site Recovery Manager makes it easy to create an isolated environment for testing while leveraging the recovery plan that would be used in an actual failover.

Automate failover and recovery. Site Recovery Manager makes it possible to automate execution of recovery plans, eliminating many of the slow and unreliable manual processes common in traditional disaster recovery. At the same time, Site Recovery Manager ensures that the recovery process is executed as intended.

Site Recovery Manager manages and automates failover and recovery of virtual machines

Site Recovery Manager also allows failover and recovery of multiple sites into one shared recovery site

How Does Site Recovery Manager Work?

Site Recovery Manager helps organizations with the key elements of building, managing and executing disaster recovery plans. The solution plugs in to the VMware vCenter Server management interface, providing integrated management for virtual infrastructure and the disaster recovery plans for that infrastructure. Site Recovery Manager also integrates with storage replication software from leading storage vendors to simplify the use of storage replication software with VMware vSphere.

Site Recovery Manager helps users with the key elements of building, managing and executing disaster recovery plans:

• Setup recovery infrastructure. Site Recovery Manager guides users through the process of connecting to the remote site and to the storage replication software in use. It also makes it easy to map production resources, including computing and network resources, to the corresponding resources at a recovery site.
• Create recovery plans. Site Recovery Manager provides an intuitive interface to help users create recovery plans for different failover scenarios and different parts of their infrastructure. Users can specify virtual machines to be suspended or shut down to free resources for recovery. They can also specify the order in which virtual machines are powered on, set user-defined scripts to execute automatically, and specify where to pause the recovery process, if necessary.
• Test recovery plans. Site Recovery Manager automates the creation of a non-disruptive and isolated testing environment on the recovery site by leveraging storage arrays’ snapshot capabilities and connecting virtual machines to the user’s isolated testing network. Site Recovery Manager automates the execution of the actual recovery plan to be used in an actual failover and cleans up the testing environment once testing is complete. Test results are saved for viewing and export at any time.
• Automate failover. Once an administrator initiates a recovery plan from VMware vCenter Server, Site Recovery Manager automates execution of the steps in the recovery plan to ensure that recovery is executed exactly as designed. Administrators have full visibility into execution of the recovery plan through vCenter Server and can pause or stop execution at any time. As their environment changes, users can update and modify recovery plans at any time through vCenter Server to ensure the plans are up to date.

Key Features of Site Recovery Manager:

Disaster Recovery Management

• Discover and display virtual machines protected by storage replication using integration adapters certified by storage vendors. Support for iSCSI, FibreChannel, and NFS-based store replication.
• Create and manage recovery plans directly from vCenter Server.
• Extend recovery plans with custom scripts.
• Monitor availability of remote site and alert users of possible site failures.
• Store, view and export results of test and failover execution from vCenter Server.
• Control access to recovery plans with granular role-based access controls.

Non-Disruptive Testing

• Use storage snapshot capabilities to perform recovery tests without losing replicated data.
• Connect virtual machines to an existing isolated network for testing purposes.
• Automate execution of recovery plans.
• Customize execution of recovery plans for testing scenarios.
• Automate cleanup of testing environments after completing failover tests.

Automated Failover

• Initiate recovery plan execution from vCenter Server with a singlebutton.
• Automate promotion of replicated datastores for recovery using adapters created by leading storage vendors for their replication platforms.
• Execute user-defined scripts and pauses during recovery.
• Reconfigure virtual machines’ IP addresses to match network configuration at failover site.
• Manage and monitor execution of recovery plans within vCenter Server.

How to Buy:

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager can be purchased individually, or as part of one of the promotional bundle listed below.

Individual Products Required for Site Recovery Manager

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
• VMware vSphere
• VMware vCenter Server

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4 Acceleration Kit for vSphere Advanced

Makes it easy to get started with automated disaster recovery for environments that need a strategic consolidation platform with superior application availability and data protection. This bundle includes the following:

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager for 6 processors
• VMware vCenter Server Standard
• VMware vSphere Advanced for 6 processors

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4 Acceleration Kit for vSphere Enterprise Plus

Makes it easy to get started with automated disaster recovery for environments that need the full range of capabilities of the leading enterprise virtualization platform. This bundle includes the following:

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager for 6 processors
• VMware vCenter Server Standard
• VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus for 6 processors

Documentation:

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Data Sheet (.PDF)