How to replicate Hyper-V VMs to the Microsoft Azure cloud

Disaster recovery planning and testing should be important in any business, but budget, resource and co-location availability are often non-existent. Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM) which uses Azure services to orchestrate disaster recovery of Hyper-V Replicas to private or hosted clouds, but this summer, they announced Azure Site Recovery (ASR) for Hyper-V VM replication to Microsoft’s Azure cloud (currently in preview). With ASR, there is no longer a requirement for your business to have a secondary location for disaster recovery, and ASR is fully integrated with Hyper-V Replica functionality.

Current pricing for ASR is advertised currently at $27 per month, but I suspect support after the preview will be priced incrementally comparative to Azure private cloud ASR which starts at $29 per month per VM and is based on the average number of VMs protected during the month. During the preview, the only support offered for ASR is via the Microsoft Azure community forums.

Configuration and connection to your ASR environment occur via the Azure Preview Portal. You will be presented with a choice for which geographic region and Azure center you want to host your ASR Replicas. Available regions include:

The requirements for Replica VMs hosted in ASR Azure cloud include:

• 64-bit architecture
• Guest OS
  • Windows Server 2008 and later
  • Linux distributions
    • Centos
    • openSUSE
    • SUSE
    • Ubuntu
• OS disk
  • 1 disk
  • Between 20MB and 127GB
• Data Disks
  • 0-16 disks
  • Between 20MB and 1023 GB
  • Format VHD (also VHDX in generation 1 only)
• Network
  • 1 adapter only, 1 IP address only
  • DHCP only
• VM type
  • Generation 1 only

I recommend you take advantage of the tutorials and free trials available to help determine how you should best setup your Replicas and create your disaster recovery plan using ASR .