With SRM, you can create one or more recovery plans. The recovery plans define the scope of what will failover, and can include a single VM, a group of VMs, or all the VMs in the data center. It’s all up to how the recovery plans are configured and upon how your existing VI installation is configured.

So, SRM does not REQUIRE HA/DRS clustering, although it will work with it.

As for guaranteeing resources, this is part of the recovery plan and the SRM configuration, where you can map resources at your protected site to resources at the recovery site.

To honest, though, Alex, I’m not sure about the answer to your last question. I believe that about 100 km is as far as you can take it using synchronous mirroring. Asynchronous mirroring can go farther. A lot of this will depend upon the specific type of SAN and the specific type of replication software that you are using.

Hope this helps!

I have a few questions about SRM.
Is SRM enabled on a VirtualCenter “cluster”, “resource pool” or just the individual VMs themselves?

Does SRM actually REQUIRE all protected VMs to be in a VC cluster? If so, must the VC cluster contain the ESX hosts at both the primary and DR sites?

If a site DOES failover, how does SRM guarantee there is enough resources for the protected VMs on the other site?

SRM relies on SAN mirroring … what is the maximum distance of a dark fiber between data centres before SAN mirroring is no longer possible?

Cheers
Alex