A day doesn't go by without some interesting Microsoft news. It's not always monumental, but it's good to see the declaration machine is pumping out communication.
Yesterday, though, the company announced some improvements to disaster recovery and backup for Azure that should prove valuable to many organizations.
First off, Azure Site Recovery gets some enhancements that IT managers will love. Release in Preview, customers can now use the service to recover VMware virtual machines and physical servers (both Windows and Linux). The feature addition allows companies to protect its on-premises, heterogeneous systems.
Built on the technology obtained as part of the InMage Systems acquisition, advantages include:
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Protection of physical Windows or Linux servers.
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Simple replication, failover, and recovery using the Azure Site Recovery portal.
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Data replication over the Internet, a site-to-site VPN connection, or over Azure ExpressRoute.
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Failback (restore) from Azure to an on-premises VMWare infrastructure.
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Simplified discovery of VMWare virtual machines.
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Multi VM consistency so that virtual machines and physical servers running specific workloads can be recovered together to a consistent data point.
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Recovery plans for simplified failover and recovery of workloads tiered over multiple machines.
You can request a trial from the Microsoft Azure services preview page. Scroll all the way down to the bottom to find it.
Secondly, the software-turned-Cloud company has announced Azure Backup into preview. Microsoft has simplified backing up and protecting on-premises systems, offering full and constant backup in three steps:
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Discover resources
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Install the extension
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Set the backup and retention policy
Gone are the days where a complex tape or disk backup system is required. Backups are performed the same way, just store offsite automatically.
In addition to simplifying the backup process, Azure Backup also follows the example of the past offering backup monitoring and reporting and restores from any recovery point.
Azure Backup is already available in the Azure Recovery Services portal.
