Microsoft announces public preview of disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines

Microsoft has unveiled the public preview of disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs) using Azure Site Recovery (ASR). Customers can now easily replicate and protect IaaS based applications running on Azure to a different Azure region of their choice within a geographical cluster without deploying any additional infrastructure components or software appliances in their subscription.

This new capability, along with Azure Backup for IaaS virtual machines, will allow users to create a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy for all their IaaS based applications running on Azure. It can be used to failover customers on-premises applications running on VMware or Hyper-V and using Windows or Linux to Azure, from on-premises to Azure, or now from one Azure region to another.

 The key features are as follows:

Offered “as-a-Service” –No additional need of software infrastructure (VMs or appliances) in Azure subscription to enable this functionality

1. Simplified experience – Simplifying enabling of cross-region DR for an application, just select the VMs businesses want to protect, choose a target Azure region, select replication settings and they are good to go
2. Application-aware recovery – With support for best-in-class recovery point objective (RPO), recovery time objective (RTO) and ASR's powerful Recovery Plans, applications can meet the recovery requirements that businesses demands. Customers can create recovery plans between Azure regions, test failovers between Azure regions and replicate their applications to the currently supported Azure regions.
3. Non-disruptive DR drills – With ASR’s test failover capability, businesses can easily perform a DR drill anytime without any impact to the primary production workload or to ongoing replication, giving them the confidence that their DR solution will work when they need it. Unlike other public cloud providers, Azure offers a fully integrated disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), alleviating the need to run updates and patch the service and allowing for faster onboarding.