Migration of Onsite servers to Azure using Site Recovery - Temporary D: drive question.

[ambrosehess795]

Dear All,

I have a question. My company is about to migrate a large number of windows servers  ( about 1700) to Azure using the Site Recovery tool .  Most of the onsite servers use a D: and E: drive .   By default  azure  windows servers  have the temporary drive set at D:\  and this could ( will) cause a conflict.  On this basis I have a couple of questions.

1. There is documentation that details changing the temporary drive to another drive  letter ie adding another disk , moving  the page file etc.  The question is this permanent ie if the virtual guest is moved 

to another host, will the temporary drive "D" re appear. ?

2.  At what stage of the migration. would you change the change the temporary drive to another drive letter. ? ( on the azure replicated instance , if that is at all possible !)

For instance if the Azure Site Recovery tool is replicating a group of say 20 windows vm's from a VMware environment to azure, will they be replicating the d: drive from  the on site production servers to azure or will the azure instance temporary drive override  this and the d:\ will fail ( ie the d:\ drive in production.

or when you finally want to fail over from your production environment

( ie shut down the onsite vm servers and fail over to the azure vm servers) from onsite  production to the Azure enviroment do you change the  the temporary "D"  drive yto another drive once they come online.?

I ask these questions as there does not seem to anything in the documentation or migration plans about this potential pit fall.

All comments and feed back is welcome

Thanking you in advance

Hector

[#2]

Hi Hector

What I suggest you to try is to perform a test failover of one of the VM's. This is safe to do as there will be no shut down performed of the source VM. This will clear up any uncertainties. My guess is that Azure will not override your replicated D: drives and will allocate another drive letter for the temporary drive.

Best of luck!
R

[#3]

@ambrosehess795 

The Azure Site recovery replicates the exact same drives of the on-premises to the Azure VM. If there are are any D & E drives, it should create the same on the new VM instead of the temporary drive.