Microsoft releases preview of Azure Site Recovery

During its annual TechEd event, Brad Anderson, Corporate VP of Windows Server and System Center at Microsoft announced the next verion of Hyper-V Recovery Manager which is now called Microsoft Azure Site Recovery. Site Recovery is a cloud based service which coordinates failover and failback between two Microsoft System Center 2012 managed datacenters. Site Recovery will provide the option to failover a site with Virtual Machine Manager managed VM’s based on Hyper-V to Microsoft Azure. Yesterday Microsoft announced a free technical preview trial of the Azure Site Recovery functionality.

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) now offers protection, replication, and failover of Virtual Machines directly to Microsoft Azure. The solution uses Windows Server Hyper-V Replica, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Microsoft Azure, delivered via the Microsoft Azure Management Portal.

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The preview also provides:

  • Support for near-synchronous data replication with RPOs as low as 30 seconds
  • Encryption of VM Virtual Hard Disks
  • Self-Service Disaster Recovery allowing for test failover, planned failover with a zero-data loss, unplanned failover, and failback.
  • Customizable Recovery Plans
  • Audit and Compliance Reporting

More information about Azure Site Recovery can be found in the following TechEd session titled: "Implementing Enterprise-Scale Disaster Recovery with Hyper-V Recovery Manager, Network Virtualization, and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2"