Site Recovery Manager and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes

You can use Site Recovery Manager to protect virtual machines on VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes storage.

The Virtual Volumes functionality helps to improve granularity. It helps you to differentiate virtual machine services on a per application level by offering a new approach to storage management. Rather than arranging storage around features of a storage system, Virtual Volumes arrange storage around the needs of individual virtual machines, making storage virtual machine centric. Virtual Volumes maps virtual disks and their derivatives, clones, snapshots, and replicas, directly to objects, called virtual volumes, on a storage system. This mapping allows vSphere to offload intensive storage operations such as snapshot, cloning, and replication to the storage system.

A Virtual Volumes storage provider, also called a VASA provider, is a software component that acts as a storage awareness service for vSphere. The provider mediates out-of-band communication between vCenter Server and ESXi hosts on one side and a storage system on the other. The storage provider is implemented through VMware APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) and is used to manage all aspects of Virtual Volumes storage. The storage provider integrates with the Storage Monitoring Service (SMS), included in vSphere, to communicate with vCenter Server and ESXi hosts. The storage provider delivers information from the underlying storage container. The storage container capabilities appear in vCenter Server and the vSphere Client. Then, in turn, the storage provider communicates virtual machine storage requirements, which you can define in the form of a storage policy, to the storage layer. This integration process ensures that a virtual volume created in the storage layer meets the requirements outlined in the policy.Site Recovery Manager supports VASA 3.0 and later.