Configure Azure Site Recovery from Windows Admin Center

With the Hybrid Cloud effort, Microsoft invested heavy to make Windows Server and Hyper-V better connect to Microsoft Azure. One way of doing that is with Windows Admin Center and Azure Site Recovery. The Azure Site Recovery integration in Windows Admin Center, allows you to easily replicate Hyper-V virtual machines to Microsoft Azure. The technology is not new, ASR does exist for a long time and allows you to not only replicate Hyper-V VMs, but also VMware VMs and physical servers. However, with the integration in Windows Admin Center, setting up Azure Site Recovery became super easy.

Set up Azure Site Recovery from Windows Admin Center

In the Virtual Machines extension, you can already see a recommendation to setup ASR: “Help protect your VMs from disasters by using Azure Site Recovery.” Which will guide you through the onboarding steps. If you don’t see that banner, just click on the VM you want to protect and replicate to Azure. Click on More and select “Set up VM Protection“, this will guide you through the same wizard.

If you haven’t connected your Windows Admin Center to Microsoft Azure yet, the wizard will help you to go through and set up this connection.

After your WAC is connected to Azure, you will now setup Azure Site Recovery for the Hyper-V host in Azure. This can directly be done from Windows Admin Center. For example, this will let you select the Azure Subscription you want ASR to connect to. It will let you create a new Resource Group and Recovery Services Vault or use an existing one. After you have done the configuration part, WAC will create the specific Azure resources and configure the Hyper-V host for Azure Site Recovery. This can take up to 10 minutes depending if you are using existing resources or creating new once.

If you have a look at the Hyper-V Replica settings in Hyper-V Manager, you will see that ASR is completely setup and configured.

Protect Hyper-V Virtual Machine with ASR from Windows Admin Center

After the Hyper-V host configuration for ASR is done, you can now start protecting the Hyper-V VMs, directly from the WAC interface. You can select the Azure Storage Account you want to use or create a new one.

Failover or migrate virtual machine

After the setup, the virtual machine will show up in the Azure recovery vault under replicated items. If you want to

Before you can failover the virtual machine, you will need to finalize the configuration. You will need to select the resource group and the virtual network; the virtual machine will use in case of a failover.

You can also configure additional virtual machine configuration settings, like the virtual machine size and name. In addition, you can now also use managed disks and configure the Azure Hybrid Benefit.

The virtual machine is now ready to perform a failover to Azure in case of a disaster. You can also use planned failover, which is a great way to migrate virtual machines to Azure without any data loss. I also highly recommend to perform a test failover of your virtual machines. This will create a test virtual network and will create the test VM in that specific network, so you can test if the replication and restore works, without impacting your production workload.

In the case you are replicating multiple virtual machines, you can also automate the disaster recovery process using an ASR failover plan.

You can get more information about Azure Site Recovery on the Microsoft documentations page.

Configure Azure Hybrid Services in Windows Admin Center Video Series

I have created a short video series which shows how to setup the Azure Hybrid services directly from Windows Admin Center. You can start with the intro here and then follow the different videos, and check out our overview blog about Configure Azure Hybrid Services in Windows Admin Center.

Besides, you can also have a look at my other blog post about how to set up Azure hybrid cloud services.

• Connect Windows Admin Center to Azure Monitor
• Azure Update Management using Windows Admin Center
• Sync File Server with Azure File Sync in Windows Admin Center
• Configure Azure Site Recovery from Windows Admin Center
• How to Setup the Azure Network Adapter
• How to Setup Azure Backup in Windows Admin Center

And you can download Windows Admin Center here. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

WAC is also part of the Azure Stack HCI solutions, check out my blog about it.