Site Recovery Manager's vSphere support

[germoles]

Hi all,

we currently host two ESX 3.5 Upd.3 production farms in one of our Company's site, and we are planning to build a new and much powerful vSphere 4 based farm. Finally, we'll upgrade the older two farms to the new product, too.

At the very end we'll also need to enable two of our production farms for Disaster Recovery with another remote Company's site (at one point this need will become bidirectional).

That's why we are trying to understand if the VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager is the right product to suite our needs or not.

Unfortunately it seems that the vCenter SRM is not yet able to manage a vSphere 4 farm: does anybody precisely know anything sure about the release date for the new SRM version (vSphere enabled)?

And also, Am I wrong in suspecting that the fact that SRM's full name includes a reference to vCenter (vCenter SRM) may suggest that an upgrade from our current Virtual Center 2.5 Upd. 3 to the newer vCenter Server version would be forcibly required in order to install and use the SRM product even against an ESX 3.5 based farm?

Thank you very much for your help.

Best regards,

Salvatore

[jbock · Accepted solution]

Salvatore,

We have shared that SRM will be compatible with vSphere 4 before the end of the year and previewed vSphere 4 + SRM functionality at VMworld in San Francisco earlier this month. We haven't yet made a public announcement about a more specific date, but stay tuned.

The currently available version of SRM (SRM 1.0 U1) is compatible with vCenter Server 2.5--you can see the details in the compatibility document at http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html. For what it's worth, "vCenter" is a product family name for our add-on management products (e.g. vCenter AppSpeed, vCenter Lifecycle Manager, vCenter Lab Manager, etc.). The product formerly known as VirtualCenter is now called "vCenter Server".

Once SRM is compatible with vSphere 4 you will need to use vCenter Server 4 to be able to use SRM with vSphere 4 servers because vCenter Server 2.5 is not compatible with vSphere 4.

Hope that helps,

Jon

[dquintana]

Exact, vmware says to be available at end off the year.

I think that we can use them in the first Q of 2010. Some of my customers cant migrate to 4 untill vCenter SRM stay ready.

Diego Quintana

Wetcom Blog: www.wetcom.com.ar/blog

[germoles]

Hi Jon,

thanks a lot for your feedback.

The information in your post will be truly valuable for us in order to correctly plan for our upgrade path and DR strategy too.

Best regards,

Salvatore

[malaysiavm]

It not for production release yet, is still under private beta

Craig

vExpert 2009

Malaysia VMware Communities -

[ealaqqad]

Hi Germoles,

You will have to wait no longer. VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0 has just been released.

Find out more at:

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4 has just been released

I hope this help some one, if it does please reward points.

Enjoy,

Eiad Al-Aqqad

System X & Storage Technical Specialist

Founder of http://www.VirtualizationTeam.com

[germoles]

Hi Eiad,

actually I did know already that SRV v4.0 had been released just today, but thanks anyway for your update.

Best regards,

Salvatore