Microsoft has enhanced its Azure Site Recovery (ASR) tools for VMware customers, making it easier for them to back up and recover their VMware virtual servers.

“Customers can now protect and replicate their VMware virtual machines and physical servers to Azure, without the need to deploy any replication or orchestration components in Azure IaaS [Infrastructure-as-a-Service],” said Abhishek Hemrajani, senior program manager of Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise, upon the new release.

The concept of ASR is simple enough – users can replicate their virtual machines (VMs) in Azure, update and then run them in Azure as a disaster recovery option. The service costs $54 per month per instance, but users won’t have to pay for compute or storage until the VM is up and running.

Naturally VMware Inc. has its own similar disaster recovery service via vCloud Air, but it’s only offered in nine locations compared to the 18 operated by Microsoft Azure.

The move to update ASR for VMware is a continuation of Microsoft’s platform-agnostic approach in line with the “cloud-first” strategy adopted by CEO Satya Nadella.

“Azure Site Recovery, as part of Microsoft Operations Management Suite, enables you to gain control and manage your workloads no matter where they run—Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware or OpenStack,” Hemrajani explained.

Existing customers can still use the old version of ASR, but Hemrajani said Microsoft strongly recommends using the enhanced version when replicating VMware workloads or physical machines on Azure. For one thing, the new version helps to tackle some of the complexity and cost issues involved in setting up disaster recovery services on Azure.

“This enhancement to ASR is designed to help drastically reduce the total cost of ownership and dramatically improve manageability and simplicity when customers choose to deploy ASR to replicate, and protect (or migrate) their VMware workloads to Azure,” Hemrajani said.

According to Hemrajani, customers will only need to pay for Azure compute resources during migration and failover operations as the new solution eliminates Azure IaaS requirements.

“Application data is replicated to customer’s Azure Storage account to ensure security and isolation, and virtual machines are provisioned in Azure only after a failover or migration is initiated,” he pointed out.

With regards to management, admins can use Microsoft’s installer technology (MSI) to install the on-premises components of ASR, which means they can “configure replication to Azure in a few simple steps without incurring the cost and complexity that traditional replication solutions entail,” Hemrajani said. Another bonus is that users can carry out “non-disruptive recovery testing” to validate VMware VM failover to Azure without impacting on production workloads.

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