Another really informative VMware PEX 2015 Session covering SRM 5.8 and the soon to be released SRM 6. Also some what’s new with vCloud Air DR, VMware Data Protection (VDP), and vSphere Replication.
If you have not heard there is no longer two editions of VDP. Basically now VDP Advanced (VDPA) becomes VDP. All of the features of VDPA will be available for no extra licensing cost.
The notes are as I took them in the session.
STO4295 – SRM & Business Continuity Overview
Mauricio Barra – VMware
Pooja Virkud – VMware
Types of Disasters:
– Power Outage
– Human Error
– Hardware Failures
– Natural Disaster
Have a valid plan of action!
BCDR are top IT Priotites
-#1 Improve data backup and recovery
-#8 Business continuity/disaster recovery
vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 6 & vCloud Air Disaster Recovery
Provide DR/BC Building Blocks
– Automation
– Data Protection
– Infrastructure
DR Orchestration – SRM
Replication – vSphere Replication/Array Based Replication
Backup and Recovery – VDP/Third Party
Compute – ESXi
Storage – VSAN/VMFS/NFS
Availability Features in vSphere 6
– Long Distance vMotion – 100ms RTTs (Disaster Avoidance, Multisite Load Balancing, Follow the Sun)
– Cross vCenter and cross vSwitch vMotions
– FT Support up to 4 vCPUs (2 vCPUs Standard and Enterprise – 4 vCPUs Enterprise Plus)
Data Protection and Recovery
– vSphere Data Protection – One day minimum RPO
– vSphere Replication – RPO from 15 min to 24 hours – VM Level Hypervisor Based
– Array based Replication – Options for zero data loss (Synchronous)
vSphere Data Protection 6
– Agent-less Disk Based
– Application-aware (even physical for SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint – requires agent)
– End to end integration with Web Client
– VDP 6 – all VDP Advance Capabilites available in VDP
– 4x more storage efficient – 6x faster recovery (Unique CBT restore technology – recover in minutes) (Variable length Dedup)
– End user file level recovery (FLR)
– Wizard driven
– One step recovery
– Virtual appliance
– Automated verification
– VDP to VDP replication
– VDP to AVAMAR Replication
– VDP + Datadomain
vSphere Replication 6 – Hypervisor-based replication
– VM-centric, storage independent
– Flexible RPO (15 min to 24 hours)
– Multiple point in time recovery – up to 24 replicas
– Light weight delta replication – reduces network bandwidth requirements
New features in vSphere Replication 6
– End to end network compression
– Network traffic isolation
– Linux file system quiescing
– More efficient full sync
vCloud Air DR
– Warm standby capacity on vCloud Air
– failover/failback per VM
– 15 minute – 24 hour RPO (Using vSphere Replication)
vCenter Site Recovery Manager 6 – automated DR
– Non-disruptive recovery testing
– automated DR (fail-over/fail-back/testing) workflows
SRM has ~14,000 customers with ~2.4 Million virtual machines protected
SRM 5.8 and 6 – What’s New
– SRM 6 not a major release – more compatibility updates – 5.8 was the major release
– SRM + SDRS Support – with heterogeneous datastore clusters
– DR for the SDDC – self service/policy based protection – Integration with vRealize Orchestrator and vRealize Automation – PowerCLI integration
– Protection of 5000 VMs
– Concurrent recovery of 2000 VMs
– Enhancement to storage stack to increase RTO
– Converged UI with vSphere (Web Client)
– Optional embedded vPostgress database
– Rule-based re-IPing at the subnet level
