Archive for What's new in Site Recovery

Caution

This article references CentOS, a Linux distribution that is nearing End Of Life (EOL) status. Please consider your use and plan accordingly. For more information, see the CentOS End Of Life guidance.

This article contains information on older features and updates in the Azure Site Recovery service. The primary What's new in Azure Site Recovery article contains the latest updates.

Updates (November 2021)

Update Rollup 59

Update rollup 59 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup KB article.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvement as detailed in the rollup KB article.
Azure VM disaster recovery Support added for Windows Server 2022.

Support added for Oracle Linux 8.4 with UEK kernel.
VMware VM/physical disaster recovery to Azure Support added for Windows Server 2022.

Support added for Oracle Linux 8.4 with UEK kernel.

Updates (September 2021)

Update Rollup 58

Update rollup 58 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup KB article.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvement as detailed in the rollup KB article.

Updates (August 2021)

Update Rollup 57

Update rollup 57 provides the following updates:

Note

Update rollup only provides updates for the public preview of VMware to Azure protections. No other fixes or improvements have been covered in this release. To setup the preview experience, you will have to perform a fresh set up and use a new Recovery Services vault. Updating from existing architecture to new architecture is unsupported.

This public preview covers a complete overhaul of the current architecture for protecting VMware machines.

  • Learn about the new architecture and the changes introduced.
  • Check the prerequisites and set up the Azure Site Recovery replication appliance by following these steps.
  • Enable replication for your VMware machines.
  • Check out the automatic upgrade and switch capability for Azure Site Recovery replication appliance.

Updates (July 2021)

Update rollup 56

Update rollup 56 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup KB article.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvement as detailed in the rollup KB article.

Azure Site Recovery Service | Made improvements so that enabling replication and reprotect operations are faster by 46%. Azure Site Recovery Portal | Replication can now be enabled between any two Azure regions around the world. You are no longer limited to enabling replication within your continent.

Updates (April 2021)

Update rollup 55

Update rollup 55 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup.
Azure VM disaster recovery Support added for cross-continental disaster recovery of Azure VMs.

REST API support for protection of Virtual Machine Scale Sets Flex.

Now supported for VMs running Oracle Linux 8.2 and 8.3.
VMware VM/physical disaster recovery to Azure Added support for using Ubuntu-20.04 while setting up master target server.

Now supported for VMs running Oracle Linux 8.2 and 8.3.

Updates (February 2021)

Update rollup 54

Update rollup 54 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup.
Azure VM disaster recovery Zone to Zone Disaster Recovery using Azure Site Recovery is now GA in four more regions – North Europe, East US, Central US, and West US 2.
VMware VM/physical disaster recovery to Azure The update includes portal support for selecting Proximity Placements Groups for VMware/Physical machines after enabling replication.

Protecting VMware machines with data disk size up to 32 TB is now supported.
Hyper-V disaster recovery to Azure The update includes portal support for selecting Proximity Placements Groups for Hyper-V machines after enabling replication.

Updates (January 2021)

Update rollup 53

Update rollup 53 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup.
Azure VM disaster recovery Replication for tags is now supported. Any tags added to Azure VMs, disks, and NICs in the source region are replicated to machines in the target region.

Azure VMs running Debian 10 are now supported for replication.
VMware VM/physical disaster recovery to Azure The update includes logging enhancements for VMware VM replication to Azure, and improved error messaging.

VMware VMs and physical machines running Debian 10 are now supported for replication.

Updates (November 2020)

Update rollup 52

Update rollup 52 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup, including new Linux support for the Mobility service.
Azure VM disaster recovery Now supported for VMs running RHEL 8.3 and Oracle Linux 7.9
VMware VM/physical disaster recovery to Azure Now supported for VMs running RHEL 8.3, Oracle Linux 7.9.

Updates (October 2020)

Update rollup 51

Update rollup 51 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup, including new Linux support for the Mobility service.

Updates (September 2020)

Update rollup 50

Update rollup 50 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup.

Updates (August 2020)

Update rollup 49

Update rollup 49 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup, including new Linux support for the Mobility service.

Updates (July 2020)

Update rollup 48

Update rollup 48 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup.

Note

Update rollup 48 has a known issue with enabling replication for Linux machines encrypted using ADE. Learn more.

Update rollup 47

Update rollup 47 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup.

Updates (June 2020)

Update rollup 46

Update rollup 46 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup.

Updates (March 2020)

Update rollup 45

Update rollup 45 provides the following updates:

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers as detailed in the rollup.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup.

Updates (January 2020)

Update rollup 44

Update rollup 44 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents There were no updates for the Site Recovery providers and agents.
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements as detailed in the rollup.

Azure VMware disaster recovery

Azure virtual machines now support VMs enable for encryption-at-rest with customer-managed keys. Learn more.

Update rollup 43

Update rollup 43 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup)
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup)

Updates (November 2019)

Update rollup 42

Update rollup 42 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup)
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup)

Azure VM disaster recovery

New features for Azure VM disaster recovery are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
UEFI Site Recovery now supports disaster recovery for Azure VMs with UEFI-based boot architecture.
Linux Site Recovery now supports Azure VMs running Linux with Azure Disk Encryption (ADE).
Generation 2 All generation 2 Azure VMs are now supported for disaster recovery.
Regions You can now enable disaster recovery for Azure VMs in the Norway geo.

VMware to Azure disaster recovery

New features for VMware to Azure disaster recovery are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
UEFI Site Recovery now supports disaster recovery for VMware VMs with UEFI-based boot architecture.

Supported operating systems include Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, SLES 12 SP4, RHEL 8.

Update to servicing stack update/SHA-2

For disaster recovery of Azure VMs to a secondary region, or on-premises VMware VMs or physical servers to Azure, note the following:

  • From version 9.30.5407.1 of the Mobility service extension (for Azure VMs), and Mobility service agent (for VMware/physical machines), some machine operating systems must be running the servicing stack update and SHA-2. Details are shown in the table below.
  • Install the update and SHA-2 in accordance with the linked KB. SHA-1 isn't supported from September 2019, and if SHA-2 code signing isn't enabled the agent extension won't install/upgrade as expected.
  • Learn more about SHA-2 upgrade and requirements.
Operating system Azure VM VMware VM/physical machine
Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Servicing stack update
SHA-2
Servicing stack update
SHA-2
Windows 2008 SP2 Servicing stack update
SHA-2
Servicing stack update
SHA-2
Windows 7 SP1 Servicing stack update
SHA-2
Servicing stack update
SHA-2.

Updates (October 2019)

Update rollup 41

Update rollup 41 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup)
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup)

Azure VM disaster recovery

New features for Azure VM disaster recovery are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Test failover settings When setting up a test failover, you can now configure settings for the test failover VM and network, including IP address, NSG, internal load balance, and the public IP address for each machine NIC. These settings are optional and don't change current behavior. If you don't configure these settings, you can choose an Azure VNet at the time of test failover. Learn more.
Recovery plans Recovery plans are now limited to 100 VMs, to ensure failover reliability.

VMware to Azure disaster recovery

New features for VMware to Azure disaster recovery are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Recovery plans Recovery plans are now limited to 100 VMs, to ensure failover reliability.

Updates (September 2019)

Update rollup 40

Update rollup 40 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup)
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup)

Azure VM disaster recovery

New features for Azure VM disaster recovery are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Cleanup after failback After failing over to the secondary Azure, and then failing back to the primary region, Site Recovery automatically cleans up machines in the secondary region. There's no need to manually delete VMs and NICs.
Test failover retains IP address You can now retain the IP address of the source VM during a disaster recovery drill, and pick a static IP address for a test failover.

VMware/physical server disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
New process server alerts We've added new process server alerts. Learn more.

Hyper-V disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Storage account Site Recovery now supports the use of storage accounts with firewall enabled for Hyper-V to Azure disaster recovery. You can select firewall-enabled storage accounts as a target account, or for cache storage. If you use firewall-enabled account, make sure that you enable the option to allow trusted Microsoft services.

This is supported for Hyper-V VMs with or without System Center VMM.

Updates (August 2019)

Update rollup 39

Update rollup 39 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup)
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup)

Azure VM disaster recovery

New features for Azure VM disaster recovery are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Encryption without Azure AD Encryption without an Azure AD app is now supported for Azure VM replication to managed disks running Windows.
Network resources for failover When failing over to another region, you can now attach network resource settings (NSGs, load balancing, public IP address) to a VM.

Updates (July 2019)

Update rollup 38

Update rollup 38 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup)
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup)

General

Site Recovery now supports the use of general purpose v2 storage accounts for cache storage or target storage. Previously only v1 was supported.

VMware to Azure disaster recovery

You can now replicate disks up to 8 TB, when replicating to an Azure VM with managed disks.

Updates (June 2019)

Update rollup 37

Update rollup 37 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents Updates to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup)
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup)

VMware/physical server disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
GPT partitions From Update Rollup 37 onwards (Mobility service version 9.25.5241.1), up to five GPT partitions are supported in UEFI. Prior to this update, four were supported.

Updates (May 2019)

Update rollup 36

Update rollup 36 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents An update to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup)
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup)

Azure VM disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Replicate added disks Enable replication for data disks added to an Azure VM that's already enabled for disaster recovery. Learn more.
Automatic updates When configuring automatic updates for the Mobility service extension that runs on Azure VMs enabled for disaster recovery, you can now select an existing automation account to use, instead of using the default account created by Site Recovery. Learn more.

VMware/physical server disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Process server monitoring For disaster recovery of on-premises VMware VMs and physical servers, monitor and troubleshoot process server issues with improved server health reporting and alerts. Learn more.

Updates (March 2019)

Update rollup 35

Update rollup 35 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents An update to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup)
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup)

VMware/physical server disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Managed disks Replication of on-premises VMware VMs and physical servers is now directly to managed disks in Azure. On-premises data is sent to a cache storage account in Azure, and recovery points are created in managed disks in the target location. This ensures you don't need to manage multiple target storage accounts.
Configuration server Site Recovery now supports configuration servers with multiple NICs. Add additional adapters to the configuration server VM before you register the configuration server in the vault. If you add afterwards, you need to re-register the server in the vault.

Updates (February 2019)

Update rollup 34

Update rollup 34 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents An update to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup).
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup).

Update rollup 33

Update rollup 33 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents An update to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup).
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup).

Azure VM disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Network mapping For Azure VM disaster recovery, you can now use any available target network when you enable replication.
Standard SSD You can now set up disaster recovery for Azure VMs using Standard SSD disks.
Storage Spaces Direct You can set up disaster recovery for apps running on Azure VM apps by using Storage Spaces Direct for high availability. Using Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) together with Site Recovery provides comprehensive protection of Azure VM workloads. S2D lets you host a guest cluster in Azure. This is especially useful when a VM hosts a critical application, such as SAP ASCS layer, SQL Server, or scale-out file server.

VMware/physical server disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Linux BRTFS file system Site Recovery now supports replication of VMware VMs with the BRTFS file system. Replication isn't supported if:

- The BTRFS file system subvolume is changed after enabling replication.

- The file system is spread over multiple disks.

- The BTRFS file system supports RAID.
Windows Server 2019 Support added for machines running Windows Server 2019.

Updates (January 2019)

Accelerated networking (Azure VMs)

Accelerated networking enables single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) to a VM, improving networking performance. When you enable replication for an Azure VM, Site Recovery detects whether accelerated networking is enabled. If it is, after failover Site Recovery automatically configures accelerated networking on the target replica Azure VM, for both Windows and Linux.

Learn more.

Update rollup 32

Update rollup 32 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents An update to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup).
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup).

Azure VM disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Linux support Support was added for RedHat Workstation 6/7, and new kernel versions for Ubuntu, Debian, and SUSE.
Storage Spaces Direct Site Recovery supports Azure VMs using Storage Spaces Direct (S2D).

VMware VMs/physical servers disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Linux support Support was added for Redhat Enterprise Linux 7.6, RedHat Workstation 6/7, Oracle Linux 6.10 and Oracle Linux 7.6, and new kernel versions for Ubuntu, Debian, and SUSE.

Update rollup 31

Update rollup 31 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents An update to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup).
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup).

VMware VMs/physical servers replication

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Linux support Support was added for Oracle Linux 6.8, Oracle Linux 6.9 and Oracle Linux 7.0 with the Red Hat Compatible Kernel, and for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 5.
LVM Support added for LVM and LVM2 volumes.

The /boot directory on a disk partition and on LVM volumes is now supported.
Directories Support was added for these directories set up as separate partitions, or file systems that aren't on the same system disk:

/(root), /boot, /usr, /usr/local, /var, /etc.
Windows Server 2008 Support added for dynamic disks.
Failover Improved failover time for VMware VMs where storvsc and vsbus aren't boot drivers.
UEFI support Azure VMs don't support boot type UEFI. You can now migrate on-premises physical servers with UEFI to Azure with Site Recovery. Site Recovery migrates the server by converting the boot type to BIOS before migration. Site Recovery previously supported this conversion for VMs only. Support is available for physical servers running Windows Server 2012 or later.

Azure VM disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Linux support Support was added for Oracle Linux 6.8, Oracle Linux 6.9 and Oracle Linux 7.0 with the Red Hat Compatible Kernel, and for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 5.
Linux BRTFS file system Supported for Azure VMs.
Azure VMs in availability zones You can enable replication to another region for Azure VMs deployed in availability zones. You can now enable replication for an Azure VM, and set the target for failover to a single VM instance, a VM in an availability set, or a VM in an availability zone. The setting doesn't affect replication. Read the announcement.
Firewall-enabled storage (portal/PowerShell) Support added for firewall-enabled storage accounts.

You can replicate Azure VMs with unmanaged disks on firewall-enabled storage accounts to another Azure region for disaster recovery.

You can use firewall-enabled storage accounts as target storage accounts for unmanaged disks.

Supported in portal and using PowerShell.

Updates (December 2018)

Automatic updates for the Mobility service (Azure VMs)

Site Recovery added an option for automatic updates to the Mobility service extension. The Mobility service extension is installed on each Azure VM replicated by Site Recovery. When you enable replication, you select whether to allow Site Recovery to manage updates to the extension.

Updates don't require a VM restart, and don't affect replication. Learn more.

Pricing calculator for Azure VM disaster recovery

Disaster Recovery of Azure VMs incurs VM licensing costs, and network and storage costs. Azure provides a pricing calculator to help you figure out these costs. Site Recovery now provides an example pricing estimate that prices a sample deployment based on a three-tier app using six VMs with 12 Standard HDD disks and 6 Premium SSD disks.

  • The sample presumes a data change of 10 GB a day for standard, and 20 GB for premium.
  • For your particular deployment, you can change the variables to estimate costs.
  • You can specify the number of VMs, the number and type of managed disks, and the expected total data change rate expected across the VMs.
  • Additionally, you can apply a compression factor to estimate bandwidth costs.

Read the announcement.

Updates (October 2018)

Update rollup 30

Update rollup 30 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents An update to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup).
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup).

Azure VM disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Region support Site Recovery support added for Australia Central 1 and Australia Central 2.
Support for disk encryption Support added for disaster recovery of Azure VMs encrypted with Azure Disk Encryption (ADE) with the Azure AD app. Learn more.
Disk exclusion Uninitialized disks are now automatically excluded during Azure VM replication.
Firewall-enabled storage (PowerShell) Support added for firewall-enabled storage accounts.

You can replicate Azure VMs with unmanaged disks on firewall-enabled storage accounts to another Azure region for disaster recovery.

You can use firewall-enabled storage accounts as target storage accounts for unmanaged disks.

Supported using PowerShell only.

Update rollup 29

Update rollup 29 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents An update to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup).
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup).

Updates (August 2018)

Update rollup 28

Update rollup 28 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents An update to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup).
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup).

Azure VM disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Linux support Added supported for RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.10; CentOS 6.10.

Cloud support Supported disaster recovery for Azure VMs in the Germany cloud.
Cross-subscription disaster recovery Support for replicating Azure VMs in one region to another region in a different subscription, within the same Azure Active Directory tenant. Learn more.

VMware VM/physical server disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Linux support Support added for RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.10, CentOS 6.10.

Linux-based VMs that use the GUID partition table (GPT) partition style in legacy BIOS compatibility mode are now supported. Review the Azure VM FAQ for more information.
Disaster recovery for VMs after migration Support for enabling disaster recovery to a secondary region for an on-premises VMware VM migrated to Azure, without needing to uninstall the Mobility service on the VM before enabling replication.
Windows Server 2008 Support for migrating machines running Windows Server 2008 R2/2008 64-bit and 32-bit.

Migration only (replication and failover). Failback isn't supported.

Updates (July 2018)

Update rollup 27 (July 2018)

Update rollup 27 provides the following updates.

Update Details
Providers and agents An update to Site Recovery agents and providers (as detailed in the rollup).
Issue fixes/improvements A number of fixes and improvements (as detailed in the rollup).

Azure VM disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Linux support Support added for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5.

VMware VM/physical server disaster recovery

Features added this month are summarized in the table.

Feature Details
Linux support Support added for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.

Next steps

Keep up-to-date with our updates on the Azure Updates page.