SRM – some clarification on limits

As VMware Site Recovery Manager continues to sell like hotcakes, some interesting internal dialog I wanted to share.

We had a customer asking about the LUN limits (“is there a 150 LUN limit with SRM?”).

Interesting observation – we have VERY large customers and of course many, many small customers – and heck, everyone in between deploying SRM.     it’s a bit of an estimate, based on the Storage Replication Adapter downloads (excluding internal downloads, excluding multiple downloads per customer) I would estimate we’re around the 1000+ mark (VMware would have the exact numbers – I’m asking for a firmer number)

The source of the question is this:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/srm_10_admin.pdf

See Page 23 for SRM Configuration Maximums:

The VM limits and Protection Group limits are firm (notable – they were warnings in 1.0, and if you upgrade to update 1, they are firm and you will get an error thrown).

There’s a mistake though – there is NOT a replicated LUN limit.   If the protection groups (groups of VMs that share an “indivisible” failover granularity based on the storage layer) are using consistency groups, the number of replicated LUNs can be much higher. 

I’ve double checked with all the EMC developers also – there is NOT an intrinsic object limit in any of the EMC SRAs.  

While I’m also on the topic – for all you really large-scale customers using SRM or evaling SRM with Symmetrix – there’s an upcoming Q2 SRA update which will improve responsiveness (during DiscoverLuns for example).   Frankly, all the EMC SRAs are getting big boosts in Q2 on many fronts.

Comments

[István Sándor]

srm_admin_4_1.pdf
Table 1-2. SRM Protection Limits
Item Maximum
Protected virtual machines in total 1000
Protected virtual machines in a single protection group 500
Protection groups 150
Datastore groups 150
Simultaneously running recovery plans 3