VMware SRM 9.0, VMware Live Site Recovery

VMware SRM 9.0 was released last week on 3/19 but I’m just getting around to it since it was not what I consider a major technical release, despite the number change. I think this is the first release post-Broadcom, and given how Broadcom has really asserted themselves over VMware, I suppose it is no surprise that the name VMware SRM, or VMware Site Recovery Manager, is now officially defunct. In its place, VMware (I’ll use the name as shorthand for both it and Broadcom) has introduced a new name: VMware Live Site Recovery (VLSR). The parent product is VMware Live Recovery which encompasses the products VMware Live Site Recovery and VMware Live Cyber Recovery. Here is VMware’s write-up since I’m not sure I can explain it more concisely.

I’m sure the VMware SRM name will live for a bit, but you can look to renaming of other products like vRealize to estimate that life.

Features

Putting aside the name change, what’s new? Well, not much actually but here’s the list of three:

• Maximum number of virtual machines per protection group increased to 1500.
• VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator Plug-in for VMware Site Recovery Manager 9.0
• VMware Aria Operations Management Pack for VMware Site Recovery Manager 9.0

So really just the first feature impacts the product. There is a benefit to having the release so lightweight and that is the array vendors do not have to change their SRAs. VMware has applied “equivalency”, meaning that if the SRA supported the last release, 8.8 (which was also equivalency btw), then it supports 9.0. If you go to the SRA download page for 9.0 you’ll see both PowerFlex and PowerMax listed. Remember, that we can’t always update our documentation on-demand, but if VMware shows support like this, we support it.

I’ve personally upgraded my setups to 9.0, and because it is a fairly small upgrade, it did not even require a staging, just an install followed by the standard reconfigure. Otherwise I did not see any difference – the SRM name is still there but you may see some glimpses of the new name when VMware is asking you to go cloud.

Known issue

There are a few old issues that VMware documents, but there is a new one that could impact any array vendor. I should mention this is an issue some of us at Dell have seen for a long time, so not sure why VMware claims it is net-new to 9.0 but it is real I assure you. It is an error when trying to upload the SRA but it can be resolved by using a different browser:

This is only for new installs or upgrades of the SRA.

Licensing

VMware seemed perfectly fine with my SRM 8.x license for version 9.