Strategies for SRM with a VNXe

Give credit where credit is due, EMC does a lot of things well.   VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) support for the VNXe is definitely not one of those.   EMC has done such a great job turning the ship around when it comes to VMware integration with their products thanks to guys like Chad Sakac (@sakacc), that it is beyond mind-boggling to me as to why it is taking such a long time to get this straightened out on the VNXe.  

Originally, it was stated that VNXe would support SRM when SRM 5.0 came out (Q3 2011), at least with NFS and iSCSI would be later down the road.  Then, the date slipped to Q4 2011, and again to Q1 2012, and again to Q3 2012, and I just saw an update on the EMC community forums where it’s now stated as Q4 2012 (https://community.emc.com/thread/127434).   Let me be clear to EMC and their engineering group, this is not acceptable.    Customers who have bought this product with the intent to move to fully replicated vSphere environments have a right to be pissed.   Partners who are responsible for designing best-in-class high-availability solutions for their SMB customers have a right to be pissed.   We don’t have unreasonable expectations or unrealistic high demands.   EMC just screwed this one up badly.

What I find most incomprehensible of all is the fact that the VNXe software is largely based on the underpinnings of the previous Celerra (NAS) product.   Celerra had SRM support for both NFS and iSCSI previously!  For Pete’s sake, how hard can it be to modify this?!?!    In a recent explanation, it was stated that the API’s were changing between SRM 4.x and 5.x.   Well, somehow every other major storage array from EMC and other manufacturers didn’t seem to have a hiccup from this in their support of SRM.   Obviously, EMC is going to focus on the high-dollar VMAX and VNX platforms first, but no excuse to let your SMB product lag this far behind.

OK, now that the rant is out of the way, what options do you have to achieve a fully replicated solution for your vSphere environment?    It really boils down to two market-proven options, though you may come across some other fringe players:

 

1)Ÿ  SRM w/ vSphere Replication

–      Seamless Disaster Recovery failover and testing

–      Tightly integrated into vSphere and vCenter

–      Easy per-VM replication management within vCenter

–      Storage agnostic – no vendor lock-in with array replication

Ÿ2) Veeam

–      Leverages backup snapshot functionality to also replicate to a remote Veeam server

–      Storage agnostic

–      Offers ability to do a file-level restore from remote replicas

–      Included as part of Veeam Backup and Replication product.

 

Here’s a table I put together showing a comparison between the two options:

	Veeam Replication	SRM w/ vSphere Replication
vSphere version required	4.0 and higher	5.0 (HW Version 7 or higher required on VMs)
Replication Methodology	VM Snapshots	vSCSI block tracking
Realistic best-case RPO	15 min	15 min
Includes Backup	Yes	No
Licensing	Per socket	Per VM
VSS quiescing	Yes (custom VSS driver)	Yes (VM Tools VSS)
Replicate powered-off VMs	Yes	No
File Level Restore from Replica	Yes	No
Orchestrated Failover based on defined DR plan	No	Yes
Easy non-disruptive DR testing capabilities	No	Yes
Multiple Restore Points from Replica	Yes	No
Re-IP VM during failover	Yes	Yes

 

So, how do you choose between the two?   Well, that’s where the proverbial “it depends” answer comes in.   When I’m speaking with SMB market customers, I’ll ask questions about their backup to get a sense as to whether or not they could benefit from Veeam.   If so, then it’s certainly advantageous to try and knock-out backup and replication with one product.   However, that’s not to say that there can’t be advantages to running Veeam for backup but using SRM with vSphere Replication as well, if you truly need that extra level of automation that SRM offers.

 

UPDATE 10/2/2012

I recently got notified about an update to the original post on the EMC community forums: https://community.emc.com/thread/127434.   An EMC representative has just confirmed that the target GA date is now Q1 2013….which marks another slip.

Also, with the announcement of vSphere 5.1 came a few improvements to vSphere Replication with SRM.   Most notably, SRM now supports auto-failback with vSphere Replication, which previously was a function only supported with array-based replication.