Just because I want to upgrade one thing doesn’t mean I want to upgrade EVERYTHING else touching it. This is why I’m pretty excited about the new VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.1 release. The first bullet point I read in the What’s New section was that they had finally decoupled vCenter from the SRM installs. On paper, this means that we will no longer have to check and cross reference the VMware solutions matrix before upgrading either vCenter or SRM. As long as you are running vCenter version 6.0U3 or higher, you will have support with SRM 8.1. Additionally, you also do not have to run the same version of vCenter between sites! So you can feel free to upgrade your vCenter in DR to the latest and greatest vCenter before making the move in production. This should give admins the time necessary to work out new features and bugs in the newest releases without having to upgrade SRM or the Production vCenters. I love the idea that you can now break out more of these upgrades into stages instead of burning all-nighters trying to get every piece of the puzzle upgraded before the workday. 🙂

Much like vSphere 6.5, the new SRM also has the slick new HTML5 Based Clarity UI. It’s clean, focused and modern and should make for easier navigation and improved management of the sites. I was recently working with a client on some SRM failover testing and was reminded of how much fun the Adobe Flash client was. 😉 Spoiler: With each passing day, I look more and more forward to it’s ultimate demise.

So how do we get to VMware’s new Site Recovery Manager? That was another bullet point surprise in the release notes. No more stepping upgrades (at least for 8.1). You can upgrade directly from 6.1.2, 6.5 or 8.0 to 8.1. One step upgrade path regardless of starting point. I hope this will prompt a lot of my customers to get their SRM implementations up to date since they are no longer shackled by their vCenter versions.

You can read the full release notes here : https://docs.vmware.com/en/Site-Recovery-Manager/8.1/rn/srm-releasenotes-8-1.html#whatsnew

– Carlo