Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Azure Site Recovery (ASR) for Azure Local, making enterprise-grade disaster recovery for on-premises virtual machine workloads simpler, more secure, and more accessible than ever before.
Since its public preview, Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local has helped organizations protect their business-critical workloads running on Azure Local clusters by replicating virtual machine workloads to Azure. With today’s release, we’re delivering a streamlined experience built on customer feedback and introducing key capabilities that remove the last friction points standing between organizations and a robust disaster recovery posture.
Disaster workloads accessible directly from Azure Local cluster view in the Azure portal.What’s changing with General Availability:
Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local is now fully supported for production workloads and available in all Azure Local-supported regions.
Simple Deployment Wizard
Before today, enabling Azure Site Recovery for Hyper-V involved a complex, multi-step setup process across multiple Azure portal blades.
With this solution, you can now prepare your entire Azure Local environment for disaster recovery through a single, streamlined one-page wizard directly within the Azure Local resource in the Azure portal.
The wizard handles everything in a single operation:
It creates your Recovery Services Vault and a Hyper-V site, automatically downloads and installs the ASR agent on every node in the cluster, associates a replication policy, and registers each host with the Azure Site Recovery service, all without requiring you to repeat steps per node or jump between portal resources.
How the wizard works:
- Navigate to Disaster Recovery
- From the Azure Local resource overview in the Azure portal, select the Capabilities tab and choose the Disaster Recovery tile.
- Launch Prepare Infrastructure
- Select “Protect VM workloads,” then “Prepare infrastructure.” The wizard opens.
- Configure in one place
- Select or create (or reuse) a Recovery Services Vault, a Hyper-V site, and a replication policy, all from the same page. Configure your proxy settings if required.
- Let Azure do the rest
- Click Prepare Infrastructure. Azure automatically installs the ASR agent on every node, registers the cluster, and associates with your policy. Monitor progress via the Notifications bell.
- Enable replication
- Once infrastructure is prepared, select Enable Replication to choose which VMs to protect. Replication begins immediately.
See the wizard in action
New in GA: WDAC Enforcement Mode Support
Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC) is a foundational security capability in Azure Local that restricts which applications and code are allowed to run on cluster nodes. Many production and highly regulated environments, including government, financial services, and healthcare organizations, operate with WDAC in enforced mode as a mandatory part of their security posture.
During public preview, customers using WDAC in enforced mode were required to temporarily switch to audit mode to install the Azure Site Recovery agent, an operationally disruptive workaround that reduced security assurance during deployment. This limitation has now been fully addressed.
Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local now fully supports WDAC in enforce mode!
Customers can prepare their Azure Local environment for disaster recovery without disabling or relaxing any Application Control policies. The ASR agent installation is WDAC-compliant and works seamlessly within enforced policy environments.
New in GA: Built-In Proxy Support
Enterprise networks commonly route outbound internet traffic through a proxy server, a requirement that is especially prevalent in regulated industries, government environments, and organizations with strict network egress controls. During public preview, configuring proxy settings for Azure Site Recovery required manual steps outside of the primary setup flow.
With general availability, proxy configuration is now a first-class part of the one-page wizard. Customers who need to route ASR traffic through a proxy can configure proxy host, port, and credential settings directly within the Prepare Infrastructure wizard, in the same operation that sets up the rest of the disaster recovery infrastructure.
This means no separate configuration files, no post-install manual steps, and no guesswork about whether proxy settings were applied correctly to each node. The wizard ensures consistent proxy configuration across the entire cluster as part of a single, atomic setup operation.
Complete Disaster Recovery Lifecycle
Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local supports the full disaster recovery lifecycle, giving organizations everything they need to meet recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for on-premises workloads.
|
Continuous Replication VM disks are replicated continuously to an Azure Storage Account, ensuring minimal data loss in the event of a disaster. |
Test Failover Validate your disaster recovery plan with non-disruptive test failovers that spin up snapshot of replicated VMs in Azure in an isolated network without impacting production replication. |
|
Failover to Azure (planned or unplanned) Fail over Windows and Linux VMs (Gen 1 and Gen 2) to Azure with a few clicks. Run workloads in Azure until your on-premises environment is restored. |
Recovery Plans Orchestrate failover for entire applications, not just individual VMs, with sequencing, automation, and dependency control. |
|
Failback Once your primary site is restored, fail back from Azure to your on-premises Azure Local environment and resume normal operations. |
Reverse Replicate Reverse replicate your VMs back to Azure to restore continuous replication and maintain ongoing protection against data loss, enabling rapid recovery in the event of another disaster. |
Who Should Enable Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local Today
Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local is well-suited for any organization running business-critical workloads on Azure Local that requires a defined and tested disaster recovery strategy. It is particularly compelling for:
- Regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, government, and the public sector who often operate in proxy-constrained network environments where BCDR requirements are mandatory and WDAC enforcement is a standard security requirement. With this GA release, the security and operational compromises that previously complicated adoption have been eliminated.
- Any organization that wants to use Azure as an extension of their on-premises environment for disaster recovery and business continuity. This cloud-integrated approach enables capabilities such as test failover, orchestrated recovery plans, and automated failback, all managed directly through the Azure portal.
- For organizations that prefer on-premises disaster recovery over cloud failover, a future option will support failback to an alternate on-premises location.
Prerequisites and Getting Started
To enable Azure Site Recovery on your Azure Local environment, ensure the following prerequisites are in place before you begin.
For machines hosting the VMs you want to protect, internet access to Azure is required for the replication traffic, or a configured proxy, which can now be set up directly in the wizard.
Support for Trusted Launch VMs is also planned for a future release.
Start Protecting Your Azure Local Workloads Today
Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local is generally available now. Open the Azure portal, navigate to your Azure Local resource, and launch the Prepare Infrastructure wizard to get started.
Share feedback on the Azure Feedback Portal →
Microsoft