• 2 min read

Announcing the Preview of Disaster Recovery for VMware Virtual Machines and Physical Servers to Azure using ASR

Today’s Preview announcement delivers on another widely requested scenario from Azure Site Recovery (ASR) users – the ability to enable protection and disaster recovery for VMware virtual machines and physical servers to Azure.

Today’s Preview announcement delivers on another widely requested scenario from Azure Site Recovery (ASR) users – the ability to enable protection and disaster recovery for VMware virtual machines and physical servers to Azure. This is among the top four requested asks on the ASR User Voice and today we are introducing this capability. ASR, with its ability to protect Hyper-V or VMware virtual machines and physical servers, is a unified solution for workload-aware disaster recovery for your heterogeneous IT environments.

The new features build on top of the technology that came with the acquisition of InMage Systems to deliver the following key functionality:

  • NEW Heterogeneous Workload Support on various different Windows and Linux editions with replication to and recovery in Azure
  • NEW Automated Discovery of VMware vCenter Server managed virtual machines for replication to and recovery in Azure
  • NEW Continuous Data Protection with software-based replication to provide near-zero Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)
  • NEW On the Fly Conversion of source VMware Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) files to bootable target Azure Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files, ensuring low Recovery Time Objectives (RTO)
  • NEW Multi-VM Consistency using ASR Protection Groups to ensure that all tiers in an n-tier application replicate consistently and failover at the same time
  • NEW Failback to VMware Infrastructure from Azure when on-premises data center comes back up post disaster
  • ENHANCED Active-Passive Replication that does not require running target Azure virtual machines at the time of replication, unlike other competitive disaster recovery products, thereby reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
  • ENHANCED Single-Click Failovers with ASR Recovery Plans to provide end-to-end workload-aware disaster recovery and orchestration at low Recovery Time Objectives (RTO)
  • ENHANCED Rich Health Monitoring for replication, failover and failback with events and e-mail notifications

 

vmware to azure

These new features are all provided through the same single solution from Microsoft, integrated user experience with ASR that our customers are used to with the Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V to Microsoft Azure DR functionality.

To try out this new functionality in ASR and to enable workload-aware DR to Azure for your on-premises VMware virtual machines and physical environments, please submit your request on the Microsoft Azure Preview features website.

With its ability to protect and coordinate the replication and recovery of any customer IT environment – Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware or others – Azure Site Recovery plays an important role in the disaster recovery plans of many organizations. As the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, Microsoft is committed to solving our customers’ business continuity challenges and enabling hybrid cloud solutions that work seamlessly across private, partner, and public clouds.

Visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with other customers. For more information, check out the Azure Site Recovery documentation.

Getting started with Azure Site Recovery is easy – all you need is to simply sign up for a free Microsoft Azure trial.