Site Recovery Manager is VMware’s product for disaster recovery management and automation. Site Recovery Manager builds on the capabilities of VMware vSphere and VMware Infrastructure to deliver rapid, reliable, and manageable disaster recovery for virtual environments. iland was one of the first VMware partners to provide SRM to customers.

Traditionally disaster recovery solutions have been too complex, unreliable and expensive for many organizations to implement. A disaster recovery solution should provide maximum protection with minimum difficulty at the lowest possible cost. VMware replication with vSphere and vCenter Site Recovery Manager ensures reliable RTOs and RPOs at a lower cost and complexity level than traditional disaster recovery allowing more organizations the opportunity to expand their disaster protection to all the applications they run on the vSphere platform.

Site Recovery Manager is not included as part of any VMware vSphere editions. However, Site Recovery Manager does require a supported version of VMware vSphere.

No, Site Recovery Manager requires an additional purchase.

There are two SRM pricing options available to iland customers:

1. iland provides monthly subscription-based licensing on a per protected virtual machine basis
2. Customers can leverage their existing SRM licensing or purchase new, perpetual licenses

iland's standard approach to Site Recovery Manager deployments is to utilize storage from iland's centralized SAN infrastructure via fiber channel. This offers a cost-effective yet secure method of storage without having to worry about dedicated storage. It also allows for easy scalability, exact storage quantity and multiple tiers of storage to be presented to the customer. In addition, customers have the control and flexibility to create their own disaster recovery plans and test them. iland also offers dedicated SAN offerings. Please contact iland for more information on these.

Site Recovery Manager can be used to protect hosts running either VMware vSphere or VMware Infrastructure. For the specific versions of ESX and ESXi which are supported by Site Recovery Manager, please refer to the Compatibility Matrix. Site Recovery Manager does not require that all licenses of VMware vSphere and/or VMware Infrastructure associated with a Site Recovery Manager deployment be the same edition.

Site Recovery Manager is supported with VMware Infrastructure Foundation, Standard, and Enterprise only. It is supported with vSphere Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus only—it is not supported with vSphere Essentials nor vSphere Essentials Plus. Please see the Compatibility Matrix for specific versions that are supported. Note that some of the functionality of Site Recovery Manager is impacted by which edition is being used. The most significant example is that without an edition that provides VMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler, resource pools (which Site Recovery Manager uses to determine where virtual machines are started up during recovery) cannot include more than one ESX server.

Site Recovery Manager is supported with vCenter Server Standard and vCenter Server Foundation only. Please see the Compatibility Matrix for specific versions that are supported. Note that each version of Site Recovery Manager requires a specific version of vCenter Server.

Site Recovery Manager allows for automated testing of disaster recovery plans as well as managing recovery in the event of a real disaster. Site Recovery Manager facilitates the process of bringing an entire virtual environment from one location to another. Site Recovery Manager centralizes the process of configuring a DR plan and allows for the testing of the plan without causing any impact to the production environment.

A Protected Site is the site in which production virtual machines are up and running. In order to protect these VMs, array based replication must be configured for the volumes that the VM data resides on. These are referred to as datastores.

A Recovery Site is the site that the protected VMs are replicated to. In the case of a disaster, Site Recovery Manager can bring these VMs online following a clear plan, minimizing downtime and recovery time.

Yes. iland utilizes VMware best practices for Site Recovery Manager 5 deployments which require that customers have dedicated vCenter/Host Servers for use as a target to take full advantage of Site Recovery Manager 5's failover capabilities. To ensure scalability for future disaster recovery needs, iland provides storage to the private cloud from our SAN clusters allowing for ease of expansion when additional storage capacity is required. By leveraging this approach our customers can take full advantage of VMware's automated failover capabilities by creating their own recovery plan which they can test and initiate at any time.