What’s New with SRM and vSphere Replication 8.1

I’m going to cover these features at a high-level SRM and vSphere Replication 8.1.

New HTML5 User Interface

Here is nice screenshot for SRM now has a slick new HTML5 based “Clarity” UI. This new interface supports all the functionality of the previous UI and the SRM and vSphere Replication interfaces have been merged to allow for easier navigation and improved management. Work has also gone into improving workflows and making the interface easier to use. For example, when configuring VMs for replication with vSphere Replication, as part of the same protection workflow the VMs can be added to a new or existing Protection Group and a new or existing Recovery Plan.

This merging of the interfaces of SRM with vSphere Replication extends throughout the new UI. It improves usability and reduces the time required to execute common workflows. The integration is designed in a way that it works regardless of if SRM or vSphere Replication are used together or if either product is used on its own. When SRM or vSphere Replication are accessed the new HTML5 interface opens in a new browser tab. 

Flexible Site Pairing – vCenter Decoupling

SRM and vSphere Replication 8.1 have been decoupled from specific versions of vCenter. This means that SRM and vSphere Replication 8.1 can be installed with vCenter 6.0U3, 6.5, 6.5U1 or 6.7. And the same version of vCenter does not have to be run at both sites (eg Site A running vCenter 6.0U3 and Site B running vCenter 6.5). SRM and vSphere Replication 8.1 also work with VMware Site Recovery, the DRaaS offering for VMware Cloud on AWS.

This flexibility makes installation, upgrades and ongoing operations with SRM and VR much simpler and easier for customers. For example, a customer running vCenter 6.0U3 with SRM 8.1 could upgrade vCenter to 6.5 or 6.7 without impacting SRM or requiring any changes to it. This enhanced interoperability greatly reduces risk and simplifies administration.

Simplified Upgrade Path

In combination with being decoupled from a specific version of vCenter, SRM & VR 8.1 also support upgrades from more than just the previous release. Customers can now upgrade to SRM and VR 8.1 from SRM and VR 6.1, 6.5 or 8.0. This combined with vCenter version flexibility makes it easier than ever to utilize the latest version of SRM. It reduces the time required and the number of steps needed which combined together reduces risk and simplifies management.

Configuration Import/Export Tool

This one is huge. A lot of customers have asked for this and we listened. SRM now has a simple, easy to use tool for exporting and importing the entire SRM configuration. This allows for customers to use it to backup and recover their configuration as well as to migrate between database types (eg. Export from MS SQL Import into vPostgres embedded DB). This tool is run from the command line on the SRM server at either site and it exports/imports the entire configuration.

Here is a quick summary of everything that is exported/imported:

• Protection Groups
• Recovery Plans
•   Priority groupings of VMs
•   VM dependencies
•   Callouts
• IP customization settings
• Network, Folder, Resource and Storage Policy mappings
• Including IP subnet mapping rules
• Placeholder VM information
• Advanced settings
• Local and remote site addresses
• Array Managers with SRA information
• Having this functionality reduces customers risk and increases manageability.

Support for more Protection Groups

SRM 8.1 now supports up to 500 Protection Groups per SRM pair, up from 250 in previous releases. This additional capacity provides flexibility for customers with large numbers of applications looking to organize their Protection Groups around individual applications.

Support for FT Protected VMs

SRM 8.1 now supports protection for VMs that require the use of Fault Tolerance. There are a few restrictions; array-based replication only, both primary and secondary FT VMs must be located on the same array consistency group and the recovery VM is recovered without FT enabled. Even with these restrictions, this added resilience should be enough to support the most critical applications.

Automation enhancements

SRM 8.1 exposes two additional APIs:

Configure and Retrieve IP Customization Settings

Add/remove Datastores from Array-Based Replication Protection Groups

These APIs in addition to those already exposed, make it easier than ever to automate and interact with SRM programmatically.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!

What’s New in vSphere 6.7 Whitepaper

VMware recent announcement and general availability of vSphere 6.7 we’ve seen an immense amount of interest. With each new version of vSphere we continue to see customers start their testing of new releases earlier and earlier in the release cycle. vSphere 6.7 brings a number of important new features that vSphere Administrators well as architects and business leaders are excited about.

vSphere 6.7 focuses on simplifying management at scale, securing both infrastructure and workloads, being the universal platform for applications, and providing a seamless hybrid cloud experience. Features such as Enhanced Linked Mode with embedded Platform Services Controllers bring simplicity back to vCenter Server architecture. Support for TPM 2.0 and Virtualization Based Security provide organizations with a secure platform for both infrastructure and workloads. The addition of support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet v2 (RoCE v2), huge pages, suspend/resume for vGPU workloads, persistent memory, and native 4k disks makes shows that the hypervisor is not a commodity and vSphere 6.7 enables more functionality and better performance for more applications.

For those wanting a deep dive into the new features and functionality, I’m happy to announce the availability of the What’s New in vSphere 6.7 whitepaper. This paper is a consolidated resource that discusses and illustrates the key new features of vSphere 6.7 and their value to vSphere customers. The What’s New with vSphere 6.7 whitepaper can be found on the vSphere product page in the Resources section or can be downloaded directly here. After reading through this paper you should have a very good grasp on the key new features and how they will help your infrastructure and business.

Finally, we have a new collection of vSphere 6.7 resources on vSphere Central to make setting up and using these new features even easier. There are also some walkthroughs on upgrading. You can see all of the currently available resources on the vSphere 6.7 Technical Assets.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!