Today Microsoft announced that Windows Azure Backup Services is general available. Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager is now in public preview. Other enhancements are:
- Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Configuration
- Active Directory: Securely manage hundreds of SaaS applications
- Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure
- Windows Azure SDK 2.2: A massive update of SDK + Visual Studio tooling support
Azure Backup Services is now general available and can be used in production environments and is backed with an enterprise SLA.
The feature allows customers to store backup data of on-premises services in Azure. Windows Servers running on-premises can easily be protected by using Azure Backup Agent. Also Microsoft Data Protection Manager is able to directly write backup data to Azure. With just a few mouse clicks backup data is stored in Azure. Data is encrypted using an encryption key only the customer knows.
Azure Hyper-V Replication Manager is now in public preview. Before there was a limited preview which could only be used by a selected number of Azure customers. Now everyone can test this new feature. Mind as long as this is a preview there is no SLA. Hyper-V Replication Manager enables an orchestrated failover from a customer primary datacenter to a customer secondary datacenter both running Hyper-V and managed by System Center 2012. Customer data is not stored in Azure. Hyper-V Replica performs replication of the data. Azure datacenters only store metadata like virtual machine names, virtual network names etc.
Using Hyper-V Replication Manager a runbook can be created which controls the restart of virtual machines in the secondary datacenter.
Other enhancements announced today are the ability to delete virtual machines and its associated virtual disks in one go. In the past seperate steps had to be taken to delete virtual disks as well. This could lead to additional storage costs because not all are aware of these orphaned disk.
Read about these announcements in this blogpost.