We on the Azure Site Recovery product team are consistently striving to simplify the business continuity and disaster recovery to Azure solutions for our customers. With the latest release of the Azure Site Recovery service for VMware to Azure, we bring a new, intuitive and simplified getting started experience, which gets you setup and ready to replicate virtual machines in less than 30 minutes!
What is new?
Open Virtualization Format (OVF) template-based configuration server deployment
Open Virtualization Format (OVF) template is an industry standard software distribution model for virtual machine templates. Starting January 2018, configuration server for the VMware to Azure scenario will be available to all our customers as an OVF template.
With the OVF template, we ensure that all the necessary software, except MySQL Server 5.7.20 and VMware PowerCLI 6.0, is pre-installed in the virtual machine template, and once the template is deployed in your vCenter Server, the configuration sever can be registered with the Azure Site Recovery services in less than 15 minutes.
Here is a quick video that walks you through the new onboarding experience.
Read more on how to deploy the configuration server template to your VMware vCenter Server / ESXi host.
New intuitive infrastructure management experience
A new web portal has been added into the configuration server, which is a one-stop-shop for all the actions to be taken on a configuration server. On all configuration servers deployed using the OVF template, this portal allows customers to modify the following settings with ease:
- Proxy server settings
- vCenter Server details and credentials
- Virtual machine credentials to install/update mobility service
Hassle-free mobility service deployment experience
One of the top issues that has bothered many customers is the requirement to open firewall rules for WMI and File and Printer Sharing services in Windows. WMI and File and Printer Sharing services were used by Azure Site Recovery service to push install the mobility service on the protected virtual machines, and in many enterprise environments these firewall ports where not open on production servers by default.
Starting with this release, Azure Site Recovery will start using VMware tools to install/update mobility services on all protected VMware virtual machines. With this change the customers will no longer be required to open firewall rules for WMI and File and Printer Sharing services before replicating virtual machines from VMware environments into Azure. This will allow easy deployment of the Azure Site Recovery mobility service on to protected virtual machines without having to get exceptions from your network security teams.
Note: VMware tools based mobility service installation will be made available to all customers who update their configuration servers to version 9.13. xxxx.x.
Start using Azure Site Recovery today. Visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with other customers. You can also use the ASR User Voice to let us know what features you want us to enable next.