Do I need SRM if I have VPLEX metro and VMWARE HA?

Many of the customer facing meetings I have the topic of SRM w VPLEX comes up. If one is doing VPLEX metro with VMWARE HA is there a need to have SRM? EMC is developing a SRA for VPLEX which will make the debate more visible. From the various blogs Ive read it seems that it would be beneficial to have SRM...draw your own conclusion!

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/02/12/vmware-ha-or-vmware-srm-what-should-i-use/

• With SRM, you get a much more well defined failover.  
  • The VMs start in a specified order 
  • You can set some VMs to be started serially with others starting in parallel 
  • You can designate VMs at the recovery site to suspend to make room for recovery VMs 
  • You can have callout scripts and predefined breakpoints to make sure that critical non-VMware activity is done at the right time and place 
  • You can set the resource pool at the remote site (with the same size or different as the source resource pool) so that you get a predictable and defined QOS on CPU and memory
• Once you have that well defined failover plan, you can test it and audit the results  
  • Testing will automatically snap the recovery LUNs so you can power on the recovery VMs without interrupting replication 
  • You can specify a test network at the second site that SRM will automatically put the recovery VMs on during a test so that they do not interfere with the running VMs 
  • You can therefore do non-disruptive DR testing any time without warning. The recovery plan executes the same as for failover, but in a “test bubble” where storage and network IO are safely segregated away from production work. 
  • There is a test results page for the recovery plan which lists all test runs, how long they took and how successful they were. From this page, you can drill down to each test run and see exactly what steps succeeded and failed and how long they took to run. 
  • With the history page, you can grade your organization over time. With the detailed reports, you can troubleshoot specific runs.

http://jasonnash.com/2010/05/17/if-i-have-vplex-do-i-need-site-recovery-manager/

As I’m flying back to North Carolina from my one whole day at EMC World I was thinking a bit about the announcements that EMC has made this week.  VPLEX is a very interesting product and I was going over possible use cases in my head. If money was no object, or if you needed VPLEX anyway, where does that leave VMware’s Site Recovery Manager?

With SRM you can do DR testing and failover, but with VPLEX and active/active data centers you can do seamless vMotions to another site. Should an unscheduled outage happen and given a geo-aware vSphere cluster couldn’t you almost just rely on the cluster handling it like a normal HA event?  Of course this assumes you have the capacity in the cluster, but you’d need that for SRM as well.  Do you need to do a formal DR test if you can just hot-move your systems over at will without disruption?  Understanding that you would need to test any non-virutalized systems, but it would greatly reduce the number.  You would need to test rebuilding a system from backup since VPLEX doesn’t offer any type of journal roll-back right now, but for standard failover it should work fine.

I realize that many people won’t have the resources or budget for a full VPLEX enabled environment but for those that do it may be an interesting option. In a lot of scenarios I’d also assume organizations would want an asynchronous replication capable VPLEX offering for longer distances and out-of-region recovery.  But, to me, this  yet again adds more reasons to virtualize all the applications that you can.  Virtualizing the tier 1 apps reduces your DR plan by a large amount with SRM and this would make it even simpler.

But it’s something to consider.