Announcing the GA of Disaster Recovery for VMware and Physical Machines with Azure Site Recovery

[Brad Anderson]

First published on CloudBlogs on Jul 09, 2015
When I announced the Preview of Disaster Recovery to Azure for VMware and Physical workloads back in March, I emphasized our commitment to provide Hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any environment – whether it’s Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized, or on Hyper-V, VMware or others. Today, after a successful Preview period, I am very excited to announce the General Availability of Disaster Recovery for VMware Virtual Machines (VMs) and Physical Servers to Azure using Azure Sites Recovery . Our early customers have put this new functionality through a rigorous period of evaluation, and their feedback has been incorporated into this high-quality GA. With our awesome Availability on Demand (AoD) solutions, enterprises and service providers of all sizes can now confidently use Microsoft Azure for DR, Cloud Migration , DevTest, and other enterprise scenarios. *AWS Windows instances can now be migrated to Azure with ASR Today’s announcement delivers on our promise to enable workload-aware disaster recovery and protection for your heterogeneous and hybrid IT environments. Building on top of functionality that we delivered as part of the Preview, the following new features are also now available:

• Smart Replication of your VMware and physical server workloads to Azure ensures that you can perform DR drills and failover tests multiple times without requiring the reseeding of source data. Data is always replicated to your own Azure Storage account to ensure maximum security and isolation.
• Support for Resize of Source Volumes ensures that as your on-prem apps grow in size, you can continue to benefit from the protection of those apps without losing DR assurance.
• Process Server Failover and Load Balancing guarantees that your DR setup can scale to meet the availability and scaling needs of your on-prem workloads.
• Multi-NIC Support for your Linux workloads is fully supported when you replicate them to Azure.

We are also expanding coverage for non-English deployments. Starting now, customers that use non-English locales for their ESXi host names, vCenter Server names, resource names, and source machine names, can benefit from ASR’s replication and protection to Azure capabilities. Also, we’re addressing a key piece of feedback about streamlined error handling, monitoring/diagnosability, and ASR dashboard notifications for new software component updates. In addition to these new and enhanced features, customers also get simplified, automated one-click recovery with ASR Recovery Plans ¸ rich-monitoring and e-mail notifications , and support for failback to on-premises once their primary datacenter recovers from an outage. For a really detailed overview of how to get started with this, check out our VMware and Physical server scenario documentation . When you’re ready to start replicating your workloads to Azure using ASR, I recommend checking out this site with even more product info and specs. It is pretty remarkable how easy the team has made it to try ASR and enable Availability on Demand . Even the test drive is easy: You can test the replication capabilities of ASR for 31 days at no charge for every new physical server or virtual machine that you replicate. If you have additional questions about ASR or want to share your experience with it, reach out on Twitter !