What is Site Recovery Manager (SRM)?

Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is the industry-leading disaster recovery (DR) management solution, designed to minimize downtime in case of a disaster. It provides policy-based management, automated orchestration, and non-disruptive testing of centralized recovery plans. It is designed for virtual machines and scalable to manage all applications in a vSphere environment.

SRM automates and orchestrates failover and failback, ensuring minimal downtime in a disaster. Built-in non-disruptive testing ensures your recovery time objectives are met.

Overall, SRM simplifies management through automation, ensures fast and highly predictable recovery times, and minimizes the total cost of ownership. SRM addresses multiple use cases, such as disaster recovery, disaster avoidance, planned data center migrations, site-level load balancing or even application maintenance testing.

vSphere Replication is VMware’s hypervisor-based replication technology for vSphere virtual machines. vSphere Replication protects virtual machines from partial or complete site failures. It simplifies DR protection through storage-independent, VM-centric replication. It also supports a variety of underlying storage solutions with multiple point-in-time recovery and customizable recovery point objectives, ranging from five minutes to 24 hours.

vSphere Replication is configured on a per-VM basis, allowing fine control over which VMs are replicated. This replication occurs from a primary site to a secondary site, between two clusters in a single site, and from multiple source sites to a single target site—regardless of the underlying storage array. vSphere Replication is a feature of the vSphere platform, and it integrates natively with Site Recovery Manager.

For maximum flexibility and choice, Site Recovery Manager integrates with vSphere through VMware Server and an underlying replication technology. It can integrate natively with vSphere Replication, vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) integrated storage arrays, or with a broad range of storage array–based replication solutions from leading storage vendors through storage replication adapters

SRM guides users through the process of configuring recovery plans. At the time of failover or testing, SRM automates the execution of the recovery plan. SRM allows teams to perform frequent non-disruptive testing, even during business hours, to ensure predictable recovery objectives. It reduces recovery time to minutes with automated orchestration workflows. And it achieves zero-downtime application mobility, orchestrating live migration of virtual machines at scale across sites.

Instances of vSphere, vCenter Server, and Site Recovery Manager are required at both the protected site and the recovery site. SRM also requires an underlying replication product to copy virtual machines to the recovery site. Customers have the choice to use either vSphere Replication, Virtual Volumes (vVols) integrated storage arrays, or third-party array-based replication software. When using array-based replication software, a storage replication adapter (SRA) is required.

Site Recovery Manager requires the use of either vSphere Replication, vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) integrated storage arrays, array-based replication, storage-based replication for iSCSI, FibreChannel, or NFS storage arrays. For storage-based replication, VMware works with storage partners to ensure that customers can deploy SRM with their choice of storage and storage replication platform. SRM works with a wide variety of replication software through storage replication adapter (SRA) plug-ins developed and certified by storage vendors for use with SRM. When using vVols integrated storage arrays, the VASA provider replaces the SRA. For a current list of SRAs and supported storage view the Storage Partner Compatibility Matrix. View the SRM for vVols Compatibility Matrix.

Visit the Site Recovery Manager Evaluation Center, your best option to explore technical documentation and installation guides to make your Site Recovery Manager evaluation a success.

VMware Site Recovery for VMware Cloud on AWS is a separate service, but it is built on top of Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication. Site Recovery provides on-demand disaster recovery as a service to protect your workloads both on-premises and on VMware Cloud on AWS. The service automates workload recovery in a DR event between on-premises data centers and VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as between different instances of VMware Cloud on AWS. It replicates workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS, allowing you to spin them up whenever you need them.

VMware Site Recovery accelerates time to protection by taking advantage of cloud flexibility and economics. Instead of building a secondary on-premises DR site, you can easily spin up a VMware environment on AWS. Site Recovery also uses the same familiar tools and operating environment—from on-premises to the public cloud—which dramatically simplifies DR operations and enables “DR in a day.”