Microsoft has renamed Hyper-V Recovery Manager, to Azure Site Recovery . The Preview of a new functionality that will enable Disaster Recovery to Azure. Microsoft’s Enterprise and SMB customers can now protect, replicate, and failover Virtual Machines directly to Microsoft Azure – our guarantee remains that whether you enable Disaster Recovery across On-Premise Enterprise Private Clouds or directly to Azure, your virtualized workloads will be recovered accurately, consistently, and with minimal downtime. ASR supports Automated Protection and Replication of VMs, Customizable Recovery Plans that enable One-Click Recovery, No-Impact Recovery Plan Testing (ensures that you meet your Audit and Compliance requirements), and best-in-class Security and Privacy features that offer maximum resilience to your business critical applications with minimal cost and without the need to invest in a recovery datacenter.

When first released, the service provided for replication and orchestrated recovery between two of your sites, or from your site to a supporting hoster’s site.  But now you can avoid the expense and complexity of building and managing your own secondary site for DR.  You can replicate running virtual machines to Azure and recover there when needed.  This new feature is in preview.

Whichever configuration you choose, the service provides automated protection, continuous health monitoring, and orchestrated recovery for your applications.

The service protects System Center Virtual Machine Manager clouds by automating the replication of the virtual machines that compose them with a policy-based solution.  It coordinates and manages the ongoing replication of data by integrating with existing technologies such as Hyper-V Replica and SQL Server AlwaysOn.

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Site Recovery monitors the state of Virtual Machine Manager clouds remotely and continuously from Azure.  All communications with Azure are encrypted, and when replicating to Azure you have the option of encryption for data at rest.

During recovery, Virtual Machines (VMs) can be brought up in an orchestrated fashion to help restore service quickly, even for complex multi-tier workloads.  Recovery plans are easy to construct in the Azure management portal, and can be as simple or as complex as required by your environment, and can include manual pauses or Windows PowerShell scripts.  Networks can also be customized by mapping virtual networks between the primary and recovery sites.

Recovery plans can even be tested whenever you like without disrupting the services at your primary location.

To better reflect these expanding capabilities, we’re renaming the service Azure Site Recovery in conjunction with the release of this new feature preview.