Azure Local - Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local is now generally available
Nice to see Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local reach GA. This gives us a supported way to replicate Azure Local VM workloads to Azure for disaster recovery, and the GA release removes the need to disable WDAC, which was a crazy ask if you ask me 🤣🤣🤣
It is almost unbelievable that it took so long for this to be generally available, as to me this seems like the most basic feature, but hey, better late than never 🤣
Official announcement
Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local is now generally available
Since its public preview, Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local has helped organizations protect their business-critical workloads running on Azure Local clusters by replicating virtual machine workloads to Azure.
With today’s release, we’re delivering a streamlined experience built on customer feedback and introducing key capabilities that remove the last friction points standing between organizations and a robust disaster recovery posture.
Azure Site Recovery for Azure Local is now generally available
This is now fully supported for production workloads and available in all Azure Local-supported regions.
The biggest improvement is a one-page Prepare Infrastructure wizard in the Azure portal, directly from the Azure Local resource. It creates or reuses the Recovery Services vault, Hyper-V site and replication policy, then installs the ASR agent and registers the cluster nodes. Once that is done, you can choose which VMs to protect and enable replication.
Two other useful changes in GA:
- WDAC enforcement mode is supported - You no longer need to temporarily switch WDAC to audit mode to install the ASR agent - cannot really believe that it was a requirement before 🤣
- Proxy configuration is built in - Configure proxy host, port and credentials in the wizard instead of applying proxy settings separately on each node.
What you get
Azure Site Recovery covers the main disaster recovery workflow for Azure Local VMs:
- Continuous replication of VM disks to an Azure Storage account.
- Non-disruptive test failovers in an isolated Azure network.
- Planned or unplanned failover of Windows and Linux Generation 1 and Generation 2 VMs to Azure.
- Recovery plans to coordinate failover for applications with sequencing and dependencies.
- Failback to Azure Local when your primary environment is ready, and reverse replication to resume protection.
Getting started
From your Azure Local resource in the Azure portal, open Capabilities, select Disaster Recovery, then choose Protect VM workloads and Prepare infrastructure.