The VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) alternative for Proxmox
Teams leaving VMware for Proxmox VE quickly hit a gap: Proxmox has no equivalent to VMware Live Site Recovery (formerly Site Recovery Manager). Asternodis fills it: SRM-class disaster recovery, built for Proxmox, at a fraction of the cost.
What VMware SRM did for you
Site Recovery Manager gave VMware shops the operational backbone of disaster recovery: array- or vSphere-based replication, recovery plans with ordered boot groups, non-disruptive DR testing in an isolated bubble network, and one-click planned or unplanned failover and failback. It turned "we have backups somewhere" into a tested, repeatable recovery process.
Why Proxmox alone isn't enough
Proxmox VE has solid building blocks (built-in ZFS storage replication, Ceph, and Proxmox Backup Server) but no DR orchestration layer. There's no recovery-plan engine, no non-disruptive test-failover, no one-click cutover, and no cross-site network re-mapping. And its built-in storage replication is ZFS-only and runs between nodes of the same cluster, leaving LVM-thin and other backends without native replication; Ceph's pool replication stays inside one Ceph cluster, and cross-site RBD mirroring is a manual Ceph setup that Proxmox VE does not configure or manage.
How Asternodis compares to VMware SRM
| Capability | VMware SRM | Proxmox alone | Asternodis |
|---|---|---|---|
| VM replication | Yes | ZFS only, within one cluster | Any storage |
| LXC container DR (test, failover, failback) | n/a | Replication only (ZFS) | Full parity with VMs |
| Non-disruptive DR testing | Yes | No | Yes |
| Recovery plans & boot order | Yes | No | Yes |
| One-click failover / failback | Yes | No | Yes |
| Near-instant failback | Storage-dependent | No | Continuous reverse sync; fall back to any healthy node |
| Manage & recover from either site | Via vCenter + SRM at each site | No | Identical UI at both, auto-routed, no split-brain |
| Network re-mapping & re-IP | Yes | No | Yes |
| Point-in-time recovery | Storage-dependent | Backups only | Verified, app-consistent points |
| Continuous recovery-point integrity scrub | No | No | Auto-quarantines bit-rot |
| Ransomware / corruption detection | No | No | Yes |
| Frozen-guest detection & recovery | No | No | Agent watch + one-click reboot |
| Boot-time guest filesystem repair | No | No | fsck + bootloader, pre-boot |
| Pre-failover go / no-go checks | Partial | No | Capacity, storage, network & machine-type |
| Two-person failover approval & audit | No | No | Built in (opt-in policy) |
| Fail-safe licensing | No | No | Pair pool; failover/failback survive expiry |
| Hypervisor | VMware vSphere | Proxmox VE | Proxmox VE |
| Starting price | Per-VM, enterprise | n/a | $995/year per site pair (up to 4 protected nodes) |
Competitor columns reflect publicly documented features as of September 2026; check each vendor's current documentation.
Recover from either site, without the vCenter tax
SRM's model leans on vCenter and an SRM instance at both the protected and recovery sites. Asternodis gives you the same "drive DR from either side" resilience with far less to run: a single lightweight controller per site, both presenting the identical web UI. Trigger failover, DR tests, or failback from whichever site you can reach. Asternodis routes each action to the controller that owns it, so two operators (or both sites at once) can't collide into a split-brain, and the recovery site stays fully in control even if the primary is completely down.
Built for Proxmox, priced for everyone
Asternodis installs on a Linux VM in seconds, connects to your Proxmox clusters, and manages replication, testing, and failover from one web UI. It works on any storage backend (including LVM-thin, where Proxmox can't natively replicate) thanks to a storage-agnostic engine built on QEMU dirty bitmaps. Commercial licensing starts at $995/year per DR Site Pair for up to 4 protected nodes, with unlimited VMs and containers, versus SRM's per-VM enterprise licensing. Personal, non-commercial home labs run the same software on the $99/year Home Lab license.
Moving off VMware? Start here
If you've migrated (or are migrating) from vSphere to Proxmox and miss SRM, Asternodis is the shortest path back to tested, orchestrated disaster recovery. Read the Proxmox disaster recovery guide, or see how Asternodis compares to Zerto.