I was talking to my colleague Paudie and he mentioned various folks were having problems finding the vSAN Snapmanager Appliance for vSAN / VCF / vSphere 9.0. The appliance used to be stored on the Broadcom Support portal under VMware vSAN >> Drivers & Tools, but it is no longer there.
This is not by mistake. Some may have heard about this, others may have skipped over it, but VMware Live Recovery, vSphere Replication, and vSAN Data Protection (which includes the Snapmanager Appliance) have all converged into a single appliance to make your life easier! This means that if you want to enable vSAN Data Protection, you now need to download the VMware Live Recovery Appliance, specifically version 9.0.3.0 or later.
Here is a nice recent blog post about this topic with further details … https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/07/01/vmware-cloud-foundation-recovery-improvements-with-vmware-live-recovery/
Yikes!! So now what used to be a free feature is now locked behind a license for VLR!
This is not looking good as we were using the free snapshotting and replication that was free with vCenter. We are now forced to look away from using VSAN and use 3rd party storage like Netapp and Pure to which provides this capability without an additional cost.
Just to be be clear:
“Snapmanager” aka “Local ESA Snapshots” work without a VLR license, so does vSphere Replication. vSAN to vSAN Replication requires VLR for orchestration of the Protection Groups, that is what requires the license.
i guess that’s good to know.
However the one feature ( vsan to vsan replication ) that would of made VSAN a no brainer to move off our Netapp is now forcing us to re think our strategy and see if Netapp or Pure are better options.
if we don’t use VSAN then we are also now being forced to look at alternative hypervisors as we are basically paying for un-used features.