Replicating Virtual Machines to Azure

The Hyper-V Recovery Manager Microsoft-hosted service has been renamed Azure Site Recovery and can now replicate virtual machines (VMs) to Azure from an on-premises or hosted installation, enabling off-site disaster recovery without a costly and complex secondary location. It requires Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and an Azure subscription. Site Recovery can be used for replicating VMs in private-to-private, private-to-hosted, and private- or hosted-to-Azure scenarios. The tool can monitor service availability and orchestrate recovery in the event of a service outage or a disaster.

Disaster Recovery Using Azure

Azure Site Recovery can form part of an organization’s disaster recovery (DR) plan by protecting Hyper-V VMs running on servers with VMM 2012 SP1 or VMM 2012 R2. The service monitors and coordinates continuous, asynchronous replication of each VM from a primary site to a secondary site using Windows Server Hyper-V Replica, a feature introduced with Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012. Hyper-V Replica copies changes made to a virtual hard disk (VHD or VHDX) at a primary site asynchronously across a network and applies them to the replica VHD at a secondary site. (The replica VM is usually not running.) Hyper-V Replica can replicate on a schedule of every 30 seconds, 5 minutes, or 15 minutes. It is not the same as Hyper-V Live Migration, which moves a running VM from one physical server to another without noticeable interruption.