SRM, PowerCLI, and some imagination

One of the things I really enjoy about being a Product Manager for VMware’s Site Recovery Manager is listening to people tell their stories. It’s always great to hear how customers have increased capacity to cope with disasters through the improved recovery orchestration and non-disruptive testing SRM offers them. As well as listening to customers celebrate their successes, being a Product Manager is about digging deep into the customers experience to understand the sources of any frustrations and identify areas where we can further improve.

One area I know that is of interest to SRM customers is increasing the automation around SRM itself. For example: being able to query SRM to see what is being protected (and what isn’t); kicking off recovery plan tests; and automatically protecting virtual machines with SRM during provisioning. Knowing this I was really pleased to hear that the PowerCLI team were working on some SRM cmdlets and, with PowerCLI 5.5 R2, that team has delivered!

My colleague Ken Werneburg wrote up a good overview of the cmdlets with some useful links and during the recent #vBrownBag Alan Renouf gave a great intro as well as a live demo (see video below).