Azure Site Recovery – Get prepared for retirement of SCVMM disaster recovery capability

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is the disaster recovery solution from Microsoft running on Azure to help you manage and recover from disaster for your on-premises infrastructure.

ASR is frequently evolving to include new capabilities and some time to get some retired.

This is the case today.

On March 1st, 2023 (so you have a little bit of time but you need to get ready and prepared), the integration of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) with ASR will be deprecated. This means that the replication to Azure Recovery from your SCVMM environment will be disrupted.

Starting March 2020, if you have such implementation you will start receiving notifications about this retirement.

You have 2 options (from Microsoft) to move to a new supported configuration:

1. Configure ASR to replicate from your Hyper-V hosts. This means instead of replicating from your SCVMM you have to reconfigure ASR to target your Hyper-V hosts (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/hyper-v-azure-tutorial). You can still use SCVMM to manage your on-premises infrastructure and you will continue to have disaster recovery using Azure Recovery services
2. Implement the underlying Hyper-V site-to-site replication capability (see https://docs.microsoft.com/windows-server/virtualization/hyper-v/manage/set-up-hyper-v-replica). This option removes use of Azure Recovery services from your disaster recovery scenario.

For both options you will have to disable the protection of all virtual machines associated with SCVMM, unregister the SCVMM servers and then reconfigure your infrastructure accordingly to your preferred scenario (above).