The bundles, announced Monday, include several previously released products built on top of VMware’s virtualization software and two that are brand-new. The new products are Site Recovery Manager, designed to disaster recovery on virtual machines; and Stage Manager, designed for deploying and updating applications on virtual machines.

IT departments often struggle to keep hardware and data in sync when a disaster recovery situation forces fail-over from one server to another, says Melinda Wilken, a senior director of marketing at VMware. Changes at primary sites have to be reflected on failover servers, and this can require a lot of manual work, she says. ()

“There’s a lot of moving parts involved and the upshot is most disaster recovery plans and processes really fail to meet the recovery objective,” Wilken says.

VMware described three key features of Site Recovery Manager:

*Integrated management of disaster recovery plans, letting IT pros create, update and document recovery plans in the VMware VirtualCenter http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/ management interface.