In the following tutorial, I will go through a step-by-step walk-through on deploying the Azure Site Recovery (ASR) VMware OVF template. This OVF template is a critical step as it bridges the connection between your On-Premises datacenter and the Azure Site Recovery Vault. Obviously there are a handful of prerequisites, as we need to prepare our VMware environment in addition, prepare our Azure workspace. I have created similar posts for Hyper-V and Azure to Azure (A2A) ASR Migrations, please visit the following link for the detailed setups of the Azure Recovery Services Vault HERE.

Let’s begin…  The first step is to download and install the VMware OVF template. The VMware OVF template can be found at the Microsoft Download Center.

Next, we need to deploy the OVF template within vCenter.

Note, this template will consuming about 1.5TB of space. This is a result of Microsoft consolidating the Configuration server and Process server into one workload.

Once the template is deployed, start the appliance and let’s begin registering our vCenter with ASR vault.

Note, the licence provided with OVF template is an evaluation licence valid for 180 days. You as the customer need to activate the windows with a procured licence.

Now we need to provide the server with some local administrative credentials.

Once you have given it some credentials, the server will auto login. The ASR wizard should launch on its own, if not, you can launch it manually — the icon should be on the desktop.

Once the ASR wizard starts, we will now need to complete the setup for this server following by registering the server with ASR.

Give the server some name, ie. VMwareASR01

Next, we need to validate the server can go over the Internet, ie. Azure and communicate as needed. If you are using a proxy, here is the time to set that up.

One thing to note, having the proxy settings configured within Internet Explorer should be removed.

Once an Internet connection has been established, we can then sign into the Azure Portal.

Now we need to sign into Azure with some credentials, ideally with a privileged/Global Administrator account.

Once you have logged into Azure successfully, you will need to reboot the server.

Once the server is back online, the next steps is to configure the Configuration server. 🙂 This step we will register this server/vCenter appliance with our Recovery Services vault. Let’s begin!

The server will auto-launch the ASR wizard, if not, launch it from the desktop icon.

Now that we have established an internet connection, we can configure our Network Interface Card(s) (NICs). Note, you can add as many as NICs needed, however, this needs to be done at the vSphere level. Once the server has been configured, you cannot add and/or remove those NICs. So, make sure you have it configured exactly as you need it. In my case, we will only need one, so, we will configure the NIC here.

Next, we need to sign into our Azure account, and select the corresponding subscription, resource group and select the appropriate recovery services vault. All of these should be available, and should have been created well before we began configure this server, as per the prerequisites…

Next, our server will download, install and configure MySQL on the server, along with the vSphere PowerCLI tools.

Gotcha, here, the appliance did not provide the vSphere PowerCLI tools, so we had to manually download, and install it.

Once we downloaded VMware’s vSphere PowerCLI toolset, we were able to continue. As mentioned, this was not provided, although it should have been. If we continued forward, the wizard would have thrown an error at the end of validation.

Next, we need to now provide the credentials and information with regards to our vCenter server(s).

Please read the prerequisites with regards to the needed permissions to allow our ASR Configuration server to communicate with the vCenter server(s).

Next we need to provide Windows and Linux based credentials to deploy install the ASR Mobility Service to all machines that will need to be replicated to Azure.

For this exercise, we are not replicating Linux machines to Azure, however if we were, similar to the Windows Mobility Service, we would need to provide some credentials that have elevated access to each of the Linux machines.

Once we have provided all the information above, we should now be able to validate some of the settings we have provided, and register our server with Azure and the Recovery Services vault. Give this a few minutes, as it took about 5 minutes to establish the communication/trust.

Once the registration of the server is complete, and the ASR appliance is officially configured with our Azure Recovery Services vault, we should now be able to see the vCenter/Configuration Server within our Azure Recovery Services vault.

If we click on the server, we can get some additional information, such as the server’s health, configuration, heartbeat, and so on…

We can also now click on the Process Server and get some additional information as well.

Now we are able to select the VMs we want to begin replicating to Azure and start testing failovers, either real, or simulated.

I hope this was helpful! Thanks, and until next time…