Azure to Azure Site Recovery - Add New Disks
For replicated Azure VMs with managed disks, you can now add new disks to Azure Site Recovery replication without having to disable and re-replicate the VM. Instead, the individual disk can be added to the replication configuration. When a new disk is detected on a VM, the replication health will go to warning and a banner will appear on the VM details page in the vault:
Going to the disks page, finding the new disk, and using the Enable Replication button will add that disk to replication. Once it's replicated, the warning status will go away.
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Azure Bastion in Public Preview
Azure Bastion, a new service that provides SSH/RDP access to VMs, has entered public preview. Azure Bastion is a new PaaS service that allows users to access VMs through the Azure Portal over SSL. No public IPs are needed on the accessed VMs, and the RDP/SSH ports don't need to be open to the internet. Instead, the Azure Bastion service mediates the connection between the user's browser and the VM's private IP address. Users simply need access to the portal and will use an HTML5 client in the browser to connect.
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Skip Shutdown Available while Stopping VMs
A new, minor feature has been added to VMs. You can now skip the guest shutdown when powering off a VM. This will stop the VM immediately, at the risk of data loss or corruption.
To use this new feature, use Stop-AzVM command in the latest Az module. The -SkipShutdown parameter will force a power off:
Stop-AzVM -ResourceGroupName "MyRG" -Name "MyVM" -SkipShutdown
Generation 2 Virtual Machines
Lastly, Generation 2 virtual machines are available in public preview. Gen 2 VMs use UEFI boot with SCSI attached disks, instead of BIOS boot with IDE disks. Gen 2 VMs provide the following advantages:
- OS disks larger than 2 TB
- Faster boot times
However, Gen 2 VMs also have the following limitations:
- No Azure Site Recovery support
- No Azure Backup support
- No Azure Disk Encryption support
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