Update rollup 57 for Azure Site Recovery -KB5006172

Introduction

We’re officially announcing the public preview to a simpler and more reliable way to protect your VMware virtual machines. We have implemented a new architecture with which, the configuration server has now been revamped as the ASR replication appliance. 

Prerequisites

To use the preview experience for your VMware virtual machines, simply create a new Recovery Services vault and get started! 

Improvements made and issues fixed in this update

After you setup this update, the following experience changes will be included.

Issues fixed and improvements made: 

• Central discovery of on-premises data centers using discovery service.

• Simplified onboarding experience by automating artifact creation and introduced defaults to reduce required inputs.

• Introduced replication key for obtaining cloud context when setting up the appliance.

• Simplified enable replication experience by reducing the number of required inputs and redefining each blade.

• Enhanced the appliance by converting all components into Azure hosted microservices. This simplifies appliance scaling, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

• Introduced certificate-based authentication, which is more secure and resolves customer’s security concerns.

• Introduced automatic upgrades for both appliance components and Mobility service.

• Implemented high availability of appliance to ensure appliance resiliency.

• Eliminated the requirement to maintain machine root credentials for performing automatic upgrades.

• Introduced FQDN based appliance connectivity.

Known issues:

• Virtual machines running on the operating system SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 machine's might not booting up post failback.

• Azure portal will show the count for partially registered ASR replication appliance too rather than ignoring it.

• Azure portal will show incorrect agent version, after successful manual agent upgrade.

• If protected virtual machine's health are in critical state, it could be because Process server services are in stopped state. If so, navigate to Services.msc and check the below services. If these services are in stopped state, start them in this order -

  1. cxprocessserver

  2. processerver

  3. processservermonitor

• The Recovery Services agent version might appear differently when viewing on Azure portal under ASR replication appliance and on Appliance configuration tool.

• Any network interface card added after replication has been enabled, will not be failed over along with the virtual machine. 

• On Azure portal, in the Replicated items blade, when choosing Columns, the list will show Process server name as the column name, instead of showing ASR replication appliance. 

• Performing re-protect from on-premises to Azure, using PowerShell commands, will fail due to the error invalid failover direction. 

Setting up your Azure Site Recovery On-Premises components

1. To use the preview experience, create a new Recovery Services vault.

2. Learn about the new architecture and the changes introduced.

3. Check the pre-requisites and setup the ASR replication appliance by following these steps.

4. Enable replication for your VMware machines.

5. Check out the automatic upgrade and switch capability for ASR replication appliance.