Announcing Azure Site Recovery: Disaster Recovery for VMware VMs, Physical Servers, & More

First published on CloudBlogs on Mar 27, 2015
Last October, I announced the GA of Disaster Recovery to Azure for Hyper-V workloads and emphasized our commitment to provide Hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any environment – whether that environment is Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized, or on Hyper-V, VMware or others. Today , I’m excited to announce the Preview of Disaster Recovery for VMware Virtual Machines (VMs) and Physical Servers to Azure using Azure Sites Recovery . Now, more than ever, Microsoft Azure is the ideal DR site for enterprises and service providers of all sizes. The ability to enable protection and disaster recovery for VMware virtual machines and physical servers to Azure has been widely requested since ASR first GA’d and, with today’s announcement, we are delivering on our promise to enable workload-aware disaster recovery for your heterogeneous IT environments. Backed by technology acquired from InMage Systems , and delivered as a single solution within ASR, the new functionality delivers the following 3 key features:

• VMware vCenter Server managed VM’s can now be replicated to and recovered in Azure. You also get application-consistent replication for your multi-VM, n-tier applications.
• Near-zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) with Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology. Low Recovery Time Objective (RTO) with dynamic conversion of source VMware Virtual Machine Disks to bootable Azure Virtual Hard Disks.
• Zero CAPEX, optimized OPEX, and low TCO when you use Azure as your DR site. This means you don’t need your application VMs to be running in Azure for ongoing replication.

In addition to these new features, other updates include: simplified and automated one-click recovery with ASR Recovery Plans¸ rich-monitoring and e-mail notifications , and support for failback to on-premises once your primary datacenter recovers from an outage. While the support for VMware VMs and physical servers is huge, today’s news includes a few more ASR announcements that have been eagerly awaited:

• While Azure works on enabling native support for Generation 2 VMs, we are introducing functionality within ASR that will convert Gen2 VMs to Gen1 during failover to Azure, and convert them back to Gen2 when you failback to on-premises. This feature, which has been one of the top requests from our customers, will be available to a limited set of users at launch, and will roll out broadly in the coming weeks.
• With Azure’s announcement of octupled OS drive size , ASR will also remove restrictions on OS drives that are larger than 127GB.
• ASR will now also support multiple NICs on VMs that failover to Azure, retaining the VM’s IP address post failover to Azure, and subnet mapping.

This announcement represents a huge delivery of features which will be hugely beneficial to enterprises and IT teams looking for DR solutions that are flexible, secure, and multi-platform. For more information and ongoing updates, check out the ASR Blog .