July 14, 2021

VMware Disaster Recovery with Site Recovery Manager is now available for Azure VMware Solution

VMware Disaster Recovery with Site Recovery Manager is available for Azure VMware Solution

Diagram showing SRM and AVS interoperating together

VMware Site Recovery Manager, the premier DR solution for VMware workloads, is now available with Azure VMware Solution as a new licensing option “Site Recovery Manager for Hyperscalers”. With this new addition, VMware disaster recovery is now possible to multiple clouds.

Site Recovery Manager with Azure VMware Solution supports the flexibility and streamlined scaling of Azure VMware Solution in combination with the automation and orchestration of Site Recovery Manager. Organizations are always looking for ways to reduce costs and overhead, and Site Recovery Manager on Azure VMware Solution enables that by eliminating the requirement for a dedicated DR site.

Site Recovery Manager, in combination with Azure VMware Solution, enhances disaster recovery by allowing organizations to replicate their virtual machines, create dynamic recovery plans, and non-disruptively test them to drive recovery readiness. Let's take a look at more of the details of what makes Site Recovery Manager a robust solution to meet the most stringent DR needs.

Abstract Complexity from DR

Site Recovery Manager simplifies the setup and ongoing management of recovery and migration plans. How? It allows customers to replace traditional, manual runbooks with centralized recovery plans, which reduces the amount of time for setup and configuration from weeks to minutes.

Showing the steps of a recovery plan

Automate Operations 

Site Recovery Manager automates the orchestration of the failover process from on-premises to Azure VMware Solution as well as between Azure VMware Solution instances. It also handles failback. The benefit? Automating these workflows eliminates errors inherent in manual processes and reduces complexity. This level of automation also enables users to test their recovery plans non-disruptively, as frequently as required, which in turn increases the predictability of recovery times and, ultimately, the level of confidence in the recovery plan. Non-disruptive recovery plan tests do not impact the protected VMs, replication, or recovery points.

Highlighting the traffic flow of vSphere Replication - from source host to target VR appliance

Safely Replicate VMs, granularly or at scale

Replication is a crucial component of disaster recovery, and Site Recovery Manager supports the flexibility of using vSphere Replication to move VM data from the source to the target site. vSphere Replication provides per-VM level replication to and from any storage supported by vSphere. vSphere Replication supports traffic encryption and compression, OS quiescing, and multiple point-in-time snapshots, which can significantly help with ransomware attacks. Additionally, Site Recovery Manager supports the flexibility of interoperating with various versions of vCenter, enhancing the ease of use.

Shows that the source and target/AVS have vCenters, hosts, SRM servers and VR appliances

Architecture

Site Recovery Manager can be configured and deployed in a few hours easily. Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication, which are both deployed as virtual appliances, are installed at the source and target sites to ensure that neither site has dependencies on the other in a disaster. Site Recovery Manager requires a vCenter server at both locations for the same reason.

Recovery site resources can be expensive. Site Recovery Manager when combined with the dynamic, on-demand scalability of Azure VMware Solution provides the ideal mixture of cost and recovery time. The recovery site resources can be kept at a minimal level until needed, and then expanded as part of the recovery process.

Recovery

Site Recovery Manager supports numerous options for recovering VMs. VMs get powered on in the exact order required by their applications. If needed, Site Recovery Manager can customize the IP address(es) of VMs as part of recovery. These can be customized on a per VM basis or as part of mapping networks and subnets.

Site Recovery Manager also supports the ability to run scripts as part of the recovery process. The recovery plan can run scripts on either the SRM server at the recovery site or on the recovered VMs themselves.

Conclusion

The world is converging to multi-cloud, and VMware supports you on your journey. VMware now supports more choices than ever for protecting the VMs that run customers' applications from disasters. Combining the flexibility of Azure VMware Solution with the established capabilities of Site Recovery Manager provides customers with another excellent option for disaster recovery.

Site Recovery Manager for Azure VMware Solution is sold and supported by VMware and VMware partners. The required SKU is “Site Recovery Manager for Hyperscalers” which is sold in packs of 25 VMs for 1- and 3-year terms. For more details see the links below. Licensing information is included in the SRM FAQ.

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Cato Grace

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Cato Grace has been a passionate user of VMware technology since 2006. He has worked for VMware in Technical Marketing since 2013, focused on Availability solutions, specifically Site Recovery Manager, vSphere Replication and DRaaS offerings VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and VMware Site Recovery for VMware Cloud on AWS. Prior to VMware, Cato spent time as both a customer and VMware partner.