Most probably all of you know already, there is a limit in VMware Site Recovery Manager Standard edition, which will allow you to protect up to 75 Virtual Machines.
What you may not know (I was surprised even some VMware Pre-Sales guys didn’t), this limit is for a physical facility or building and running instance of SRM.
VMware Product guide says:
For VMware Site Recovery Manager Standard Edition, You may use VMware Site Recovery Manager subject to the following restrictions:
(a) protect up to seventy-five (75) Virtual Machines within a physical facility or building; and
(b) for each running copy of VMware Site Recovery Manager Standard Edition, manage up to seventy-five(75) Protected Virtual Machines (“SRM Standard Edition Restriction”).
If at any given time, the number of Protected Virtual Machines in subsections(a)or(b)exceeds seventy-five(75), You are required to upgrade all Your VMware Site Recovery Manager Standard Edition licenses to VMware Site Recovery Manager Enterprise Edition.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, the SRM Standard Edition Restriction shall not apply if a failover of Protected Virtual Machines causes the number of Protected Virtual Machines to exceed the SRM Standard Edition Restriction within a physical facility or building for a reasonable period of time.
As you can see VMware was even kind enough to let you breach this limit “for a reasonable period of time” in case of DR event. This would allow you to protect more than 75VMs at recovery site to orchestrate your fail-back as well, since 75VM was only soft limit.
Therefore this effectively means, if you have multiple active-active datacenters (not acting as recovery sites only), you can protect more than 75VMs with SRM Standard license. Of course every site has to act as recovery site for the other and you still have to adhere 75 protected VMs limit per site. So in case of 2 datacenters you can protect 150VMs, in case of 3 datacenters 225VMs and so on (SRM allows you to act as recovery site for multiple protected sites).
This is nice to know as VMware Site Recovery Manager Enterprise edition is about 4times more expensive.
However soft limit functionality changed since SRM 8.1, where they quietly hardcoded this limit!
Well to be fair, they are still allowing you to breach it according to the product guide, you just cannot do it if you are using SRM Standard key. If you want to re-protect failovered VMs, you will get “There are not enough licenses installed to perform the operation” message.
VMware Support response was to ask our VMware representative to give us test licenses.
If you are not using “Recovery Test” feature and doing standard recovery, re-protect and then fail-back. This is something you have to plan for your DRP tests. During real DR scenario there will be most probably more time to get a new license key for re-protect and fail-back till the dust settles.
Test recovery is a very nice and useful feature where you can test your plans online for VMware environments, however it is not so useful if you have mixed environments and the other technologies doesn’t allow you to do a such thing.
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