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Classic experience to protect VMware machines using Azure Site Recovery will be retired on 30 March 2026

Published date: March 31, 2023

In October 2022, we launched modernized experience to protect VMware VMs and physical servers. Since then, we've been enhancing our capabilities. We will begin deprecating Azure Site Recovery's classic experience to protect VMware VMs and physical servers on 15th March 2023 because modernized experience now has full capabilities of classic experience and other advancements. This functionality will be completely retired on March 30, 2026.

To avoid service interruption and minimize your security risk, please transition to the modernized experience before 30 March 2026.

The existing/classic experience that ASR offers to protect VMware and Physical machines will NO longer be supported starting 30 March 2026, and below is the retirement plan and the timelines to upgrade to the new modernized experience:

  1. Starting effectively on 15 March 2023, you can only use the new modernized experience to enable ASR for all newly created Recovery Services vaults.
  2. Your existing VMware and physical machines can remain on the classic management experience until 30 March 2026.
  3. Replication health of all machines not migrated by 30 March 2026 may get disrupted.

We encourage you to make the switch sooner to gain the richer benefits of modernized experience. In addition to the familiar features you are using, here’s a quick comparison between classic and modernized experience.

 Classic Experience

Modernized experience

  • Extensive number of steps and input for onboarding and setup.
  • Easier onboarding of workloads with 50% fewer configuration steps
  • Used a stateful configuration server, along with separate on-premises components which made scalability and discovery cumbersome.
  • Introduced stateless ASR replication appliance, which can easily be scaled out and performs central discovery of on-premises environment.
  • Manual upgrades should be performed for both mobility agent and configuration server components.
  • Automatic upgrades are available for both mobility agent and ASR replication appliance.
  • Only the configuration server which had been used for enabling replication could be used for further operations.
  • Any ASR replication appliance can be used for failback and re-protect operation.

 

Required action

After 30 March 2026, the classic experience will not be supported. Follow the detailed steps in thismigration guide to transition to modernized experience. Learn more about the migration capability here. 

Pricing for both the experiences remains the same.

Help and Support

If you have questions, get answers from community experts in Microsoft Q&A. If you have a support plan and you need technical help, create a support request. 

  • Azure Site Recovery
  • Retirements

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