General availability: Enable Azure Site Recovery (ASR) while creating Azure Virtual Machines

Announcing a new capability in Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to further improve the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) posture of Azure VMs – in-line enablement of ASR at the time of VM creation. This capability helps you avoid the hassle of separately configuring DR across regions (or zones) after the creation of VMs.

We recognize that as you move and more business-critical applications to Azure, their resilience is of prime importance. ASR is a key pillar of our resiliency offering, which allows you to protect your Azure VMs against regional outages.

Previously, there was no seamless way to enable ASR during the creation of a VM. You had to follow through and execute a different workflow to protect the VM from regional (or zonal) outages after the VM was up and running. With our latest release, you will be able to enable ASR while creating a VM. ASR will be one of the VM Management options alongside the ones currently available to you for configuration – Monitoring, Identity, and Backup, among others.

To get started, simply head over to the Azure portal. Go to ‘Virtual machines’ and click on ‘+ Add’. Go to the Management tab and select ‘Enable Disaster Recovery’ under ‘Site Recovery’. Make the relevant selections and proceed to create your VM. Once the VM is created, replication will be automatically enabled within a few minutes.

Please note that this offering is currently limited to Windows VMs and CentOS, Oracle Linux, and Red Hat Linux VMs. We also do not support zone to zone (in region) disaster recovery through the Create VM workflow currently. Support for pending Linux distros and zone to zone disaster recovery is coming soon.

Learn more how to create a Windows VM or a Linux VM via the portal.