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Azure Site Recovery Backs Up VMs into the Cloud

Preview version of newly dubbed Hyper-V Recovery Manager eliminates need for additional hot site for backups.

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 06/20/2014

Azure Site Recovery, which is the redubbed and updated Hyper-V Recovery Manager that was shown at Microsoft's TechEd last month, was released as a preview last Thursday.

Azure Site Recovery takes Hyper-V Recovery Manager a step farther than point-to-point replication by eliminating the need for a secondary datacenter or hot site for backup and recovery, with VMs replicated to Azure directly.

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," the company 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. It also protects Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager clouds by setting up automated replication of the VMs, which can be performed based on policies. It integrates with Microsoft's Hyper-V Replica and the new SQL Server AlwaysOn feature.

The service 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 manor to enable quick recoveries, even in the case of multi-tier workloads.

Customers can test it in the Azure Preview Portal.