Sean Crookston

By now you probably already know about the announcement of vSphere 5 and all the great things it does for the cloud and for the large enterprises, but small and medium businesses deserve some attention for this announcement too.vSphere 5 and add-on products like Site Recovery Manager provide some of that.

One of my favorite new offerings in vSphere 5 is the Virtual Storage Appliance(VSA). While other vendors have offered similar virtual or physical counterparts, this is the first offering from VMware. It is a licensed product and while it is not free, the cost can be easily justified in that you do not need to purchase dedicated storage. Additionally using something like the VSA spread across several hosts instead of local storage allows the usage of features such as vMotion, DRS, and HA.

other great new feature that is a part of Site Recovery Manager is the ability to replicate virtual machines on a per VM basis, without a need to worry about the underlying storage. This allows businesses without the underlying supported storage technology that was required in prior versions to get in on the game and provide at least some level of disaster recovery to their business using VMware’s product.

These are two great new offerings/features that give some smaller environments some great new features that enable them to benefit from virtualization in ways they could not before.

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