Site Recovery Manager FAQs

VMware Site Recovery Manager is a pioneering disaster recovery management and automation solution for VMware Infrastructure. It integrates closely with VMware Infrastructure, VMware VirtualCenter and partners’ replication software to make recovery rapid, reliable, affordable and manageable. It provides centralized management of recovery plans, automates the recovery process and enables dramatically better testing of recovery plans. 

VMware Site Recovery Manager can be used to protect any application running in a virtual machine.  VMware Site Recovery Manager operates independently of the applications running inside virtual machines.

VMware Site Recovery Manager integrates tightly with VMware Infrastructure and VMware VirtualCenter.

VMware Site Recovery Manager requires a supported version of VMware VirtualCenter Management Server and of VMware Infrastructure.  Please see the VMware Site Recovery Manager documentation for full details on supported versions of VMware VirtualCenter and VMware Infrastructure.

VMware Site Recovery Manager does not provide replication.  It requires storage-based replication available from VMware storage partners.

VMware Site Recovery Manager is designed for use with array-based replication for iSCSI and FibreChannel SAN storage.  VMware has worked with leading storage vendors to enable them to provide integration modules (known as “storage replication adapters”) that allow Site Recovery Manager to work with their replication products.  Partners currently working with VMware to provide support for their platforms include:

3PAR
Compellent
Dell
EMC
Falconstor
Hitachi Data Systems
HP
IBM
LeftHand Networks
NetApp
Xiotech

For the list of currently-supported storage and replication platforms please see the VMware Site Recovery Manager Compatibility Matrix.

VMware Site Recovery Manager is a separate product that is not included with VMware Infrastructure.

 VMware Site Recovery Manager is licensed per-CPU for ESX hosts that are running virtual machines that are protected by VMware Site Recovery Manager.  If VMware Site Recovery Manager is configured only to fail over virtual machines from the protected site to the recovery site, VMware Site Recovery Manager licenses are required only for the hosts at the protected site that are running the protected virtual machines.  If VMware Site Recovery Manager is configured to fail over a set of virtual machines from a protected site to a recovery site at the same time as it is configured to fail over a different set of virtual machines from the recovery site to the protected site, VMware Site Recovery Manager licenses need to be purchased for the protected hosts at both sites. 

A VMware Site Recovery Manager deployment will also require the necessary licenses of VMware VirtualCenter and VMware Infrastructure.  VMware Site Recovery Manager requires a licensed VMware VirtualCenter at both protected and recovery sites because both VMware VirtualCenter instances are active instances.  VMware Site Recovery Manager also requires enough VMware Infrastructure licenses at the recovery site to meet the minimum resource requirements of the virtual machines that are configured to fail over to the recovery site at all times.  The VMware Infrastructure licenses at the recovery site can be used to run other virtual machines even while being part of a VMware Site Recovery Manager configuration.