VMware SRM 5.8 GA with EMC SRDF SRA

A couple days ago VMware released Site Recovery Manager 5.8.  Ben Meadowcroft from VMware has a nice write-up of the major features it contains which you can find here: http://www.benmeadowcroft.com/ .  Although there are lots of items on the list, the most obvious change is the removal of the vSphere Client (thick client) and integration into the vSphere Web Client.  Unlike managing your vCenter, however, you cannot use either client for SRM.  Everything has moved to the Web Client.  Having used the vSphere Client for so many years with SRM, I can tell you the Web Client does take some getting used to, but the additions are great.  Some of the enhancements are really nice like being able to have reciprocal objects created at the same time (e.g. Inventory mappings) instead of tediously going to each site.  Here are a couple screenshots just to get the flavor:

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I’ll leave the exploring of the new features to you.

As Ben noted in his blog, the current SRAs that support SRM 5.5, support SRM 5.8.  Below I have the SRDF SRA installed on both sites:

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From a certification standpoint, this means you can immediately start using the SRDF SRA with SRM 5.8.  For those customers who are taking advantage of EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) I am sorry to say that the functionality of the SRA Utilities has not been ported to the VSI Web Client.  Rest assured development is working away assiduously on it, but it won’t make our Q3 release.  So what does this mean?  Well, fortunately the VSI plug-in has always been an optional free software.  Our SRDF SRA with SRM works perfectly fine without it as many of our customers know.  There is, however, an option available to continue using the SRA Utilities with SRM 5.8.  What you can do is use a combination of the vSphere Client and Web Client.  The SRDF SRA relies on XML files.  The SRA Utilities simplifies the management of these XML files.  Fortunately the SRM plug-in is not required for the SRA Utilities to work as shown here in my screenshot of the SRM 5.8 environment:

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So this means you can still use VSI to manipulate the XML files.  Great, but now what?  Well once you have completed the XML changes and saved them, the files need to get moved to the same directory on the SRM 5.8 server  – after all the SRDF SRA has not changed.  So copy EmcSrdfSraTestFailoverConfig.xml, for example, to:  C:\ProgramData\EMC\EmcSrdfSra\Config on the new SRM 5.8 server and you’re ready to test.  I’ve done lots of tests already with SRM 5.8 using this methodology and it works perfectly fine, though it will be much better once the porting to the VSI Web Client is complete.

For all things SRDF SRA and SRM, be sure to check out the TechBook:

http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/technical-documentation/h10553-sra-vmware-5-0-tb.pdf