Microsoft provides comprehensive Availability on Demand (AoD) in Azure for hybrid and heterogeneous environments, allowing organizations to harness a near unlimited amount of compute and storage in the cloud for DevTest, cloud bursting, migration, reporting/analytics, recovery, backup and long-term data retention.
As an enabling technology for AoD, Azure Site Recovery provides a unified solution to replicate Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines and physical servers to Azure, thereby enabling workload-aware recovery and migration for your heterogeneous IT environments. Using ASR’s replication technology, you can enable automated, application-aware protection, and orchestrated one-click recovery/migration of physical and virtualized workloads to Azure.
Microsoft Migration Accelerator’s functionality, which enables pain-free migration of physical servers, and VMware, AWS and Hyper-V virtual machines to Azure, is now incorporated into Azure Site Recovery. Application data needs to be replicated to Azure only once and can be used for both migration and disaster recovery. You also get a consistent ASR experience in the Azure portal.
With AoD, you can use ASR to migrate heterogeneous workloads to Azure and solve IT challenges with the power of Microsoft Azure:
- Reduce the burden on IT and lower costs for your on-premises infrastructure
- Control where you run apps and store data for a true hybrid experience
- A scalable and reliable platform for both Tier 1 and Tier 2 workloads
- Increase datacenter agility with on demand, near-limitless cloud scalability
Customers that want a solution that enables migration of their existing on-premise virtualized workloads to Azure, most often look for three very important considerations when making the decision:
- Reduce downtime of production workload during migration
- Test applications in Azure before migration
- Replicate data to Azure only once, for both migration and recovery
For customers, who want a unified solution that meets the above criteria (and more), Azure Site Recovery with its in-built features can help make migrating to Azure simple, reliable, and quick. Here is how you would go about migrating an on-premises application to Azure:
Here are a few resources to get you started:
- Setup protection between on-premises VMware virtual machines or physical servers and Azure
- Setup protection between on-premises Hyper-V Site and Azure
The following table lists the different on-premises source environments that can now be migrated to Azure with ASR:
| Source | Target | Availability | Supported Guest OS Types |
| Hyper-V 2012 R2 | Azure | Available | All Guest OS types supported by Azure |
| Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1 and 2012 | Azure | Available in Preview | Windows* and Linux* |
| VMware vCenter Server 5.0, 5.5, ESXi 5.0, 5.5 and Physical Servers | Azure | Available in Preview | Windows* and Linux* |
| Amazon Web Services (Windows AMIs) | Azure | Available in Preview | Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1+ |
| Hyper-V 2012 | Hyper-V 2012R2 | Available | All Guest OS types supported by Hyper-V |
*Limited to Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1+, CentOS 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.4, 6.5, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3
Once you are ready to get started, check out additional product information, to start migrating your workloads to Microsoft Azure using Azure Site Recovery. Now we’ve made it easier to try Azure Site Recovery to enable Availability on Demand, and to extend and help protect your datacenter. You can use the powerful replication capabilities of Site Recovery for 31 days at no charge for every new physical server or virtual machine that you replicate.
Check out the following blog by Joel Ferman for more information on the AoD Migration announcement and ASR price change.