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Guest OS support for ASR Hyper-V 2012R2 to Azure

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Hello!

One of the great features for enterprises enabled by the hybrid cloud concept is a cloud disaster recovery. Native Azure solution which stands for enterprise-class DR is named Azure Site Recovery service. It supports multiple DR scenarios, including replica orchestration between two local sites, VMware and bare metal replication to Azure, Hyper-V replica. On Azure website you can find a whole bunch of documentation about the service, from an overview to a good technical detalization.

But while for the most of you it may be pretty obviuos which virtualization scenarios are supported by ASR, it's surprisingly not very easy to find a clear list of supported guest operational systems. Today in my post I'd like to provide you with some links which may be helpful for understanding what exact workloads are supported by ASR in scenario Hyper-V 2012R2 to Azure, and what VMs are actually supported in Azure in general.

1. Let's start from the official docs. What Hyper-V VMs can I protect? - If you're replicating to Azure, Site Recovery supports all the guest operating systems that are supported by Azure. Here you should keep in mind that there are some differences in guest OS support for Hyper-V 2008R2 and Hyper-V 2012 (see table here https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/migrate-heterogeneous-it-environments-to-azure-with-asr/)

2. What are these guest operating systems supported in Azure? Let's divide them in two groups - Linux and Microsoft Servers. Regarding Linux, we have a list of so-called Endorsed Distributions, which are optimized for running in Azure. You can find it here https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-linux-endorsed-distributions/ That's the list of supported Linux guest OS. If you'd like to run on Azure a Linux system which is not there, you may try to make it compatible by following these instructions: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-linux-create-upload-vhd-generic/

3. The detailed list of Microsoft Servers supported in Azure is available here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2721672

4. Finally, here is a general info about workloads supported for protection in ASR: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/site-recovery-workload/

Hope this short note will be helpful.