• Consolidation: Hardware infrastructure can be consolidated at both the production and failover sites to reduce costs. The recovery hardware can also be used to run low-priority workloads including test and development environments.
• Hardware independence: Virtual machines are completely independent from their underlying hardware. Organizations can use older or less expensive hardware at the failover site to reduce costs.
• Encapsulation: On vSphere, the entire system—including OS, application, and data—is encapsulated as a set of virtual machine files. By replicating those files to the failover site, the entire system can be recovered in a fast single-step process, accelerating typical recovery times from an average of 40 hours down to an hour or less.

Centralize Management and Automate Recovery

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager complements vSphere to ensure the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. vCenter Site Recovery Manager leverages cost-efficient vSphere Replication or storage-based replication to provide centralized management of recovery plans, enable non-disruptive testing, and automate site recovery and migration processes. vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides the following key capabilities:

 

• vSphere replication: vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides built-in vSphere Replication for simple and cost-efficient replication. vSphere Replication is the industry's first hypervisor-based replication, purpose-built for vSphere and Site Recovery Manager. vSphere Replication enables the use of heterogeneous storage across sites.
• Broad support for storage-based replication: vCenter Site Recovery Manager supports a broad range of storage-based replication products from VMware's storage partners. Storage-based replication provides powerful replication to protect larger sites and business-critical applications.
• Centralized recovery plans: With vCenter Site Recovery Manager, setting up a centralized and automated recovery plan is simple and can be done in a matter of minutes through an interface that is tightly integrated with vCenter Server.

• Automated failover and site migrations: vCenter Site Recovery Manager automates the entire site recovery and migration process. Upon initiating a disaster failover, business services are automatically recovered with limited or no manual intervention.
• Non-disruptive testing: With vCenter Site Recovery Manager, failover testing can be performed as frequently as required and is non-disruptive to production systems. Organizations are able to quickly identify any problems with recovery plans to enable fast resolution.