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Microsoft Releases Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Service

Microsoft said that it's Windows Azure disaster recovery service is now production-environment-ready

• By Kurt Mackie
• 01/17/2014

Windows Azure disaster recovery service is now production-environment-ready, said Microsoft. Last week, it released its Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager. 

HRM is a convergence of several Microsoft products. Agents from System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012 R2 or System Center VMM 2012 SP1 are used to coordinate private cloud failovers, with the actual failover carried out with Hyper-V Replica technology, which is a feature of Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2012 R2.

Microsoft offers a 99.9 percent service level agreement with the service, which can be used for disaster recovery. IT pros can customize its orchestration policies to address various scenarios. In addition, HRM has a test feature that will execute a failover in a temporary virtual machine, without interrupting the production environment.

The new service may also be available from some service providers or hosting companies, since Microsoft now permits that kind of licensing. However, no examples of such service providers were described in Microsoft's announcements this week.

For a limited time, Microsoft is offering a 50 percent price discount on the Windows Azure HRM service. The offer is good through February 28.