I am working on a solution for one of my customer and evaluting SRM 5.1 with Vsphere Replication 5.1 against array based replication. Would like to know
1.) How many ESX servers can I protect using vSphere 5.1 replication
2.) what are pros and cons of using vSphere 5.1 against Array based replication. I understand that RDM,snapshots and FT VMs can't be replicated using vSpere 5.1 replicator.
any ideas?
My thought abouts it:
Pros:
Less complex, can have different storage vendors on different sites.
Can replicate more granualar, per vm instead of datastore
Can replicate to local disk on DR site (cheap solution)
Free, some SAN vendors want extra money for replication.
Cons:
15 minuts / replication at minium.
Only VMDK files, not "iscsi luns" directly mapped to a VM
I'd suggest to move this in the Site Recovery Manager community to receive better response
There is my short list of VMware vSphere Replication limitations. It’s more like a comparison with 3-party products rather than with array-based replication. Nevertheless, I hope you’ll find this information useful.
So, here it’s:
• Unlike other 3-party products, vSphere Replication provides single restore point only. And it seems to be the major limitation.
• No failback option available.
• No traffic compression.
• No traffic throttling.
• No network customization (network mapping).
• No re-IP upon failover.
• Basic VSS quiescing (no application-aware processing, which is necessary for replicating VM running VSS-aware applications (such as Active Directory, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint), since this functionality guarantees backup transactional consistency of such VMs).
• Works within single vCenter only.
Thanks.