Azure Site recovery

Question

I am trying to work my way through Azure Site Recovery, and I was setting up a vmware vsphere esxi 6 on my pc. I have a couple of doubts. First, can I do this setup on my pc as I have a windows server 2012 R2 already on it and then do the ASR over to azure. Second, is it possible to do an asr from a vsphere esxi environment that has been setup in a workstation player on my pc.

Either way I should be able to do an ASR. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I have to do a few demos for the enhanced VMware to ASR scenario.

I use VMware Workstation 12 Pro to create an ESX host and I use normal Windows Server VMs for the rest of the machines (an example is install a vCenter server).

Remember using VMware Workstation you have to enable the bit that allows "nested" virtualisation (like inception but the VM type!) here is an article that might be useful - https://communities.vmware.com/thread/498837?start=0.

/D

Answer 2

You won't be able to do "VMWare to Azure" ASR scenario on a Windows machine. It requires ESX at the hypervisor level i.e. at the physical machine level. Having only VMWare workstation player doesn't solve your purpose. The VMWare ESX won't be able to provide virtualization if ESX itself is running inside a VM.

The scenario that you can test on your windows Workstation is the Hyper-V to Azure. You can enable Hyper-V as a hypervisor (provided the motherboard on your machine supports virtualization). Then in Azure, you can create a Recovery Vault and select the "Hyper-V site to Azure" scenario and test. You can use the link as provided by @Prab

Answer 3

Is Windows 2012 R2 your current Hypervisor on your PC? If not you can install the Hyper-V role and then do an ASR for a standalone Hyper-V to Azure. The ESXi Environment you have on your PC, does it contain any VMs. The setup is quite different in both scenarios since you would need a separate Management Server for ESXi while Hyper-V server would just need the agent and the vault registration key. Below is the link for your guidance.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/site-recovery-hyper-v-site-to-azure/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/site-recovery-vmware-to-azure-classic/ PS, try the preview on the ARM portal for recovery services. its very cool :)