VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0

VMware have now released SRM 4.0 with support for vSphere and NFS amongst other new features. This will bring the ability to upgrade to vSphere to a lot more customers. SRM 4.0 not only supports vSphere hosts but will also support 3.03 and 3.5 ESX hosts, although you do need to be running vCenter 4.0.

The features listed as new in this release are as below taken from the release notes

New in This Release

This release of Site Recovery Manager introduces several new features:

Full compatibility with vCenter 4.

Full support for NFS-based arrays.

Support for shared recovery sites.
Enables many-to-one pairings of protected sites with a recovery site. For more information, see the technical note Installing, Configuring, and Using Shared Recovery Site Support, which is available at http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html.

Resilience in the face of vCenter unavailability during a test recovery.
Placeholder virtual machines can be quickly repaired after the protected site vCenter becomes available again.

New repair-mode installation features.
You can run the SRM installer in repair mode if you need to change configuration parameters such as vCenter credentials, database connection information or credentials, and certificate details.

Graphical interface to advanced settings.
Eliminates most requirements to edit the XML configuration file

Support for DB2 as an SRM database server.

New licensing options.

Improved scalability.
A single protection group can now include up to 1000 virtual machines.

Full Compatibility With DPM (Distributed Power Management)
SRM recovery plans can now power-on or power-off a host that is in standby mode.

New Option to dr-ip-customizer Utility
The dr-ip-customizer utility now logs less verbose diagnostic output by default. To force dr-ip-customizer to log the same level of diagnostic output that it produced in earlier releases, use the -verbose option.

Change in Certificate Validation
When you select certificate authentication, the SRM installation validates the certificate you supply before continuing. Certificates signed with an MD5 key are no longer allowed.

Support for Protecting Fault-Tolerant Virtual Machines.
SRM can now protect virtual machines that have been configured for fault-tolerant operation. When recovered, these virtual machines lose their fault tolerance, and must be manually reconfigured after recovery to restore fault tolerance.

Improved context-sensitive Help.

PDF documents available on release media
Current versions of the PDF documents for this release are available in the docs folder at the root of the SRM 4.0 CD. Updated versions of these documents may be available at http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html.