I’m excited to announce the GA of an important functionality in Azure Site Recovery (ASR) that lets you enable replication and protection of your VMware workloads and physical machines to Azure. ASR, with its ability to protect Hyper-V or VMware virtual machines and physical machines, is a unified solution for workload-aware disaster recovery and protection of your heterogeneous and hybrid IT environments.

The functionality has been in Preview since March this year, and has successfully passed the rigorous evaluation and validation goals of our early customers. With marquee customers already on board, and with their early feedback incorporated, ASR’s SLA-backed offering is now ready to replicate your on-premises workloads to Azure.

ASR, as the replication technology behind Microsoft’s Availability on Demand (AoD) solutions, enable enterprises and service providers of all sizes, to use Microsoft Azure for DR, Cloud Migration, DevTest, and other enterprise scenarios.

The GA builds on top of the feature set that we delivered during the Preview, which has been expanded to offer the following enhancements:

• With Smart Replication, you can perform DR drills and failover testing without reseeding of source data. Like other scenarios, application data is always replicated to your own Azure Storage account to ensure security and isolation.
• With Support for Resize of Source Volumes, your on-premises applications can grow in size, without losing the assurance of ASR’s on-going replication and protection
• Now, your DR setup can scale to meet your organizations needs with Process Server Failover and Load Balancing
• With Multi-NIC Support for your Linux workloads, you get better control over how your virtual machines’ network connectivity is configured when you replicate them to Azure
• We are also expanding coverage for non-English deployments; customers that use non-English locales for their ESXi host names, vCenter Server names, resource names, and source machine names, can now benefit from ASR’s replication and protection to Azure capabilities
  *AWS Windows instances can be migrated to Azure

With this GA, our customers also get improved security and reliability, better error handing, monitoring and diagnosability, and ASR dashboard notifications for new software component updates

These are in addition to features such as heterogeneous workload support, automated VMware vCenter Server discovery, continuous data protection (CDP), multi-VM consistency, one-click failovers, rich health monitoring and e-mail notifications, and failback to on-premises once the primary datacenter recovers, which we released at Preview.

For details instructions, check out our VMware and Physical server scenario documentation and learn how to get started. Visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with other customers, or use the ASR UserVoice to let us know what features you want us to enable next.

Once you are ready, check out additional product information, to start replication your workloads to Microsoft Azure using Azure Site Recovery. We’ve made it easier to try Azure Site Recovery and enable Availability on Demand – you can use the powerful replication capabilities of Site Recovery for 31 days at no charge for every new physical or virtual machine that you replicate.