General availability: Simplified disaster recovery for VMware machines using Azure Site Recovery

Today we’re officially announcing the general availability of a simpler, more reliable, and modernized way to protect your VMware virtual machines using Azure Site Recovery, for recovering quickly from disasters. We are now offering these enhancements:

Stateless ASR replication appliance

The configuration server and its on-premises components have been converted into a stateless ASR replication appliance. This simplifies discovery and failback process by introducing the option to select any appliance without needing to set up any master target server or process server.

Automatic upgrades for ASR replication appliance and mobility agent

A big deal breaker with the classic architecture was manually updating various configuration server components and mobility service. To simplify things we now support automatic upgrades – as soon as an update arrives, all the appliance components and mobility service will be updated automatically and that too, out of business hours.

Additionally, for automatic upgrades, the machine’s root/admin credentials will not be required anymore and will be required only for the initial installation.

Easier scale management

The appliance is now a single unit of management and all its components have been converted into micro-services which are hosted on Azure. This will not only make the troubleshooting much easier, but scale management will also become much smoother. To scale out an appliance, just set up another appliance and voila, it is done.

High availability for appliances

Appliance resiliency has also been a highly asked about topic and we have that covered too. With the modernized architecture, you don’t need to take regular backups of your appliance anymore – just spin up another appliance and switch all your machines to the new appliance. The replicated items will be switched to the new appliance, without going through complete replication again.

With this release, we will also support disaster recovery of physical machines along with private endpoints and managed identity support. 

Learn more about the modernized architecture and move to the modernized experience now.