Purchasing a Subscription for VMware Live Recovery

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

You can choose among several different purchase options to buy an Advanced Cyber Compliance or VMware Live Recovery Cloud subscription.

• If you want to use the cloud for protecting and recovering VMs, you can purchase a VMware Live Recovery Cloud subscription to get VMware Live Cyber Recovery capabilities. For more information about purchasing a subscription, including terms and conditions, see the Specific Program Documentation (“SPD”) and SaaS Listing for VMware Live Recovery.
• As of November 2025, the capabilities of VMware Live Recovery — VMware Live Site Recovery with vSphere Replication and vSAN Data Protection — are sold as a VCF advanced service called Advanced Cyber Compliance, which provides data protection and recovery for VCF environments. Advanced Cyber Compliance also allows you to buy VMware Cloud Director Availability, which provides disaster recovery as a service for VMware workloads across multi-tenant VMware clouds.
• For more information on purchasing an Advanced Cyber Compliance subscription including terms and conditions, see the Advanced Cyber Compliance Specific Program Documentation (“SPD”).
• If you only want to use disaster recovery without cyber protection and recovery, you have the option to purchase a standalone VMware Site Recovery Manager license for VCF, VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or legacy vSphere software (Standard, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus). For more information about purchasing a subscription including terms and conditions, refer to the VMware Site Recovery Manager Specific Program Documentation (“SPD”).

Environment

VMware Live Recovery 9.x

Resolution

Subscription Type

You can purchase the following subscription types:

1. Protected VM subscriptions

• • The number of protected virtual machines, even if the virtual machines are currently powered on in the recovery site.
  • A 'protected VM' is a VM that is included in a protection group that is replicating snapshots to a secondary site which are available to use for VM recovery.
  • A VM subscription is required for both Advanced Cyber Compliance (VMware Live Site Recovery) and VMware Live Recovery Cloud (VMware Live Cyber Recovery).

2. Protected capacity subscriptions

• • Protected capacity is the sum of the logical (used) storage size of all protected virtual machines and all incremental cloud backups (snapshots) you choose to retain.
  • If you intend to only purchase Advanced Cyber Compliance, then you do not need to buy a protected capacity subscription.
  • Protected capacity subscriptions only apply to VMware Live Recovery Cloud subscriptions, which give you VMware Live Cyber Recovery capabilities, requiring a minimum quantity of 10 TiBs per-subscription region.
  • You can expand capacity in increments of 1 TiB. No minimum purchase is required for the number of VMs you want to protect.
  • If you are not sure how much protected capacity you need, use the VMware Live Recovery Planner to estimate your needs.

vSAN Data Protection local snapshots and vSphere Replication with an RPO 5 minutes or higher is included in your VCF purchase. To enable remote replication with vSAN Data Protection snapshots, or to achieve RPO less than 5 minutes with vSphere Replication, contact your sales representative to buy an Advanced Cyber Compliance subscription.

Offline Mode for VMware Live Site Recovery

• If you have VMware Live Site Recovery servers that are deployed in an offline environment (disconnected from the Internet), you can create an offline license key for VMware Live Site Recovery. The offline license key allows you to pair servers and protect VMs in an offline mode.
• You can create an offline license key for an existing VMware Live Site Recovery pair or a new pair by choosing the number of VMs you want to protect. Then, you can set an expiration date for the license.
• This offline license key can be changed by increasing or decreasing the number of VMs you want to protect, and by changing the expiration date of the modified license.
  For more information, see How do I set up VMware Live Site Recovery to work in offline mode?
• If you stop using offline mode, ensure that you properly remove the offline mode license key.
• If you do not follow the offline license removal process, you cannot return the subscribed VM quantity to your license pool for future use.
• Offline mode is supported for VMware Live Site Recovery version 9.0.2 and above.

Purchasing VMware Live Cyber Recovery Recovery SDDCs

• VMware Live Cyber Recovery uses the recovery SDDC for disaster recovery and ransomware recovery operations.
• Recovery SDDCs use VMware Cloud on AWS hosts to enable ransomware and disaster recovery environments.
• You can pay for recovery SDDC host usage on VMware Cloud on AWS in the following ways:

1. 1. VMware Live Recovery users are required to maintain a minimum of reserved 2-node SDDC environment, to ensure disaster recovery (DR) and that recovery plans meet RTO/RPO service level agreements.
   2. You can add hosts for just-in-time for ransomware and disaster recovery test and failover. The price is charged daily, payable in arrears, invoiced quarterly.
      For more information, see Simplifying Billing and Invoicing for VMware Cloud on AWS.
   3. For larger recovery operations or temporary scaling needs, you can use 'burst hosts', which allow you to dynamically expand your infrastructure on-demand. A burst host is an additional compute host that is temporarily provisioned during a disaster recovery or cyber recovery event.
   4. To use burst hosts, you must purchase at least two reserved nodes (the pilot light), and then coordinate with your VMware account representative to enable burst host capability at the organization level. Burst host usage is billed based on daily consumption and invoiced on a quarterly basis. Burst host usage is based on host availability. Any burst host charges billed in arrears are billed based on the usage in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
   5. If you are an AWS Resell customer, you can follow the same process but you must have a commercial relationship with Broadcom. You establish a commercial relationship with Broadcom by purchasing any VMware by Broadcom subscription. A VMware by Broadcom subscription is required to perform disaster and ransomware recovery operations.
   6. For planned disaster recovery tests, you can purchase a 90-day subscription in advance with monthly pricing.

Contact your sales VMware by Broadcom sales representative for more information.

Legacy Site Recovery Manager Subscriptions

• If you currently have a legacy Site Recovery Manager subscription, you can continue to use the product until the end of the subscription term. At the end of the term, to expand your disaster recovery usage you must purchase a new Advanced Cyber Compliance term subscription to cover the additional usage.
• If you are a VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), VCF, or legacy vSphere user, you can purchase a standalone Site Recovery Manager license for on-premises disaster recovery disaster recovery. See Downloading Software for VMware Live Site Recovery Software.
• Legacy Site Recovery Manager subscriptions and Advanced Cyber Compliance subscriptions cannot be combined.