At VMworld 2015 SRM Air was announced. SRM Air is Site Recovery Manager as a Service with recovery options to vCloud Air. Of course, we all know SRM for on-premises environments; with SRM you can build a disaster avoidance and disaster recovery solution leveraging array based replication or vSphere replication. SRM also features powerful orchestration functionality, allowing you to build a disaster recovery plan.
With SRM Air, VMware brings Site Recovery Manager to the cloud. Currently the offering is in technical preview. At the solution exchange I’ve learned several things about SRM Air:
- SRM Air is a complete new product and is not integrated with the on-premises SRM.
- SRM Air is build by the same team that builds on-premises SRM.
- SRM Air is running on VMware vCloud Air, and is SRM as a Service. This means no initial installation and configuration of the application.
- SRM Air includes the same features as the current version of SRM: the web-based interface is part of vCloud Air and (from a functional perspective) looks the same as on-premises SRM.
- Currently SRM supports disaster avoidance and recovery to vCloud Air, leveraging the vCloud Air DR offering.
- SRM Air offers a rich feature set and adds extra value on the existing vRO vCloud Air DR automation options.
- In the future SRM Air might support DR options for on-premises datacenters. This option would be an addition or replacement of the current SRM offering. With this addition SRM Air will compete with Microsoft’s Azure Site Recovery Offering.
I think SRM as-a-service is a great addition to the vCloud Air offering. With the addition of on-premises DR options in the future, SRM Air will replace a lot of the current on-premises SRM implementations. For now I think SRM Air is a great option to improve a vCloud Air DR implementation.
Also read “Disaster recovery options for virtual infrastructures“.
