News

Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Product Released as Preview

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• June 20, 2014

Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, previously called Hyper-V Recovery Manager, is now available in preview, Microsoft said on Thursday.

First announced at last month's TechEd conference, Azure Site Recovery is more than a rebranded version of Microsoft's old disaster recovery (DR) tool; it also represents Microsoft's effort to make Azure a hot site for data recovery. While Hyper-V Recovery Manager, released in January, provides point-to-point replication, Microsoft says Azure Site Recovery aims to eliminate the need for a secondary datacenter or hot site just for backup and recovery.

"What if you don't have a secondary location?" was the question posed by Matt McSpirit, a Microsoft technical product manager, during the TechEd opening keynote. "Microsoft Azure Site Recovery [provides] replication and recovery of your on-premises private clouds into the Microsoft Azure datacenters."

The original Hyper-V Recovery Manager required a secondary datacenter. "When first released, the service provided for replication and orchestrated recovery between two of your sites, or from your site to a supporting hoster's site," Microsoft said in a blog post Thursday. "But now you can avoid the expense and complexity of building and managing your own secondary site for DR. You can replicate running virtual machines to Azure and recover there when needed."

Microsoft says both offer automated protection, continuous health monitoring and orchestrated recovery of applications. Azure Site Recovery also protects Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) clouds by setting up automated replication of the virtual machines (VMs), which can be performed based on policies. It integrates with Microsoft's Hyper-V Replica and the new SQL Server AlwaysOn feature.

Azure Site Recovery monitors clouds with SCVMM remotely and continuously, according to Microsoft. All links with Azure are encrypted in transit with the option for encryption of replicated data at rest. Also, Microsoft said administrators can recover VMs in an orchestrated manner to enable quick recoveries, even in the case of multi-tier workloads.

Customers can test Azure Site Recovery in the Azure Preview Portal.