With the latest release of the Azure Site Recovery service for VMware to Azure, a new initiative has been brought that lets users initiating virtual machines replication in less than 30 minutes.
In the industry, the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) template serves as the standard software distribution model for the majority of the virtual machine templates. Now all customers can have configuration server for the VMware to Azure scenario, as an OVF template.
The OVF template makes sure that all the important software, except for MySQL Server 5.7.20 and VMware PowerCLI 6.0, is pre-installed in the template of the virtual machine, and as soon as the template is deployed in your vCenter Server, the Azure Site Recovery services will take hardly 15 mins to register the configuration server.
The configuration server has now received a new web portal, which is to serve as a one-stop-shop for all those actions that are to be executed on a configuration server. This portal enables customers to modify the following settings on the configuration servers which are deployed using the OVF:
The need to open firewall WMI and File Printer Sharing services are the two primary issues that have bothered customers the most. Azure Site Recovery service employed the use of WMI and File and Printer Sharing services in order to install the mobility service on the protected virtual machines. These firewall ports were not open in many enterprise environments on production servers by default.
VMware tools will be used by Azure Site Recovery to install/update mobility services on all protected VMware virtual machines. The customers will now not need to open firewall rules for WMI and File and Printer Sharing services before copying virtual machines from VMware environments into Azure. This way, the deployment of the Azure Site Recovery mobility service to protected virtual machines will be made easier as it will not get any exceptions from the network security teams.
