Today, we are pleased to offer seamless upgrade of classic Backup or Site Recovery vaults to ARM based Recovery Services vaults.
Last May 2016, we announced the General Availability of Recovery Services (RS) vault based on the Azure Resource Manager for Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery. Since then, we announced many new features for both services which are available only with Recovery Services vaults. The new upgrade feature allows customers on the older classic vaults of both Backup and ASR to seamlessly upgrade to RS vault with minimal downtime, no loss of data, recovery points or configuration settings, and take advantage of all the new features available with RS vaults.
New features available only in Recovery Services vaults
Backup
Enhanced capabilities to help secure your backup data: With Recovery Services vaults, Azure Backup provide security capabilities to protect cloud backups. These security features ensure that you can secure your backups and recover data using cloud backups if production and backup servers are compromised. Learn more
Central monitoring for your hybrid IT environment: With Recovery Services vaults, you can now monitor not only your Azure IaaS VM backups but also your on-premises backups from a central portal. Learn more
Role based Access Control: Recovery Services vaults are based on the Azure Resource Manager model and thus bring you the benefits of RBAC access that restrict backup and restore access to the defined set of user roles. Learn more
Protect all configurations of Azure Virtual Machines: Recovery Services vaults can protect Resource Manager based V2 VMs including Premium Disks, Managed Disks and Encrypted VMs. This allows you to upgrade your classic V1 VMs to V2 VMs and retain your older recovery points for the V1 VMs as well as configure protection for the newly upgraded V2 VMs in the same vault. Learn more
Instant restore for IaaS VMs: Using Recovery Services vaults, you can now restore files and folders without having to restore the entire IaaS VM thus enabling you to have faster restores. This support is available for both Windows and Linux VMs. Learn more
Site Recovery
Azure Resource Manager support: You can protect and failover your virtual machines and physical machines into Azure ARM stack. You get the benefits of RBAC access that restrict replication and recovery operations to the defined set of user roles.
Streamlined ‘Getting Started’ experience: Simplicity has been the design goal of Recovery Services vaults. The new Getting Started experience vastly simplifies setting up disaster recovery for your applications.
Exclude Disk: This feature allows you to exclude specific disks that do not contain important data from being replicated. You can save storage and network resources by not replicating unwanted churn.
Support for Premium and Locally-redundant Storage (LRS): You can now protect applications that need higher IOPs by replicating into premium storage.
Support for managed disks: You can attach managed disks to your machines after failover to Azure. Using managed disks simplifies disk management for Azure IaaS VMs by managing the storage accounts associated with the VM disks.
For more details, please refer to this blog.
No impact to ongoing replication or existing backups
The entire upgrade process has been designed to be quick, smooth and easy to perform.
There is no physical data movement between the old vault and the upgraded vault and the upgrade process only involves updating configuration settings.
Once started, the upgrade typically takes about 15-30 minutes. During periods of heavy load, this could take up to 1 hour.
During the upgrade process, replication and scheduled backups will continue to happen, so you will remain protected.
During the upgrade, you will not be able to do management operations.
For Backup, these include new registrations, configuring new cloud backups and restoring IaaS VMs.
For Site Recovery, it includes operations such as registering a new server, performing a test failover, executing a failover, failback.
Post upgrade, all your settings and configuration will be retained, including all backup and recovery points that you created from the classic vault.
How to upgrade?
There is significant demand for upgrading to the RS vault, and we are expecting a number of customers to sign up for upgrade. To streamline this process, we will be releasing customers into the upgrade queue in batches. You can sign-up for upgrade using the following links:
Backup vaults: Sign up
Site Recovery vaults: Sign up
Once your subscription has been white-listed for upgrade, Microsoft will contact you to proceed with the upgrade.
Quelle: Azure
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