Home > Data Protection > PowerProtect Data Manager > Cloud Disaster Recovery Best Practices > AWS and Azure compatibility
There are known AWS and Azure compatibility limitations of the virtual machines that can run on AWS or Azure as EC2 instances or VMs, meaning not all virtual machines can be protected to the cloud and recovered. These known limitations are documented in the administrator guide and a full list is available in the simple support matrix document available at dell.com/support, make sure to review it before protecting virtual machines.
When using PowerProtect Data Manager or Cloud DR Add-on with AWS deployments, before sending copies to the cloud, there is a check to verify if the VMs are compatible for AWS. If VMs are not compatible, they will not be sent to the cloud at all because they will not be able to run as EC2 instances on AWS.
You can configure to protect these unsupported VMs to allow direct recovery to vCenter or VMware Cloud on AWS.
Some on-premises VMs are configured to use UEFI in their vSphere environment, while others use BIOS. Not all cloud platforms support UEFI, so VMs that use UEFI might not be able to recover in the cloud. Using the Simple Support Matrix and the administrator guide, verify that your VMs can run on the cloud before you start protecting them.
While RecoverPoint for VMs will replicate to AWS VMs that are using UEFI, the Cloud DR Add-on and PowerProtect Data Manager will not, unless configured otherwise. You can use the PowerProtect Data Manager or Cloud DR Add-on user interface to allow that in order to support direct recovery from S3 copies to VMC (VMware cloud on AWS) in AWS deployments, or to recover to an on-premises vCenter - which is available for both AWS and Azure deployments.
Enabling protection of unsupported VMs from the CDRA:
Enabling it from PowerProtect Data Manager using the Protect unsupported VMs toggle button: