Tag: Azure Site Recovery

100 Days of Cloud — Day 19: Azure Site Recovery

Its Day 19 of my 100 Days of Cloud journey, and todays post is about Azure Site Recovery.

Credit — Microsoft IT Ops Talk Community/Sarah Lean

We saw in the previous post how easy it is to migrate infrastructure to the cloud from on-premise Virtual and Physical environments using the steps and features that Azure Migrate can offer.

Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery is another “replication” offering in the Azure Service portfolio that provides replication of machines from any of these primary locations to Azure:

  • On-Premise Physical
  • On-Premise Virtual (Hyper-V or VMware)
  • Azure VMs from a different region
  • AWS Windows instances

However, while Azure Migrate is a “cloud migration” service offering, Azure Site Recovery is a Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery offering.

How it works?

The steps for setting up Azure Site Recovery are mostly similar for all scenarios. You need to do the following steps:

  • Create an Azure Storage account, which will store images of the replicated VMs.
  • Create a Recovery Services Vault, which will store metadata for VM and Replication configurations.
  • Create an Azure Network, which VMs will use when replicated to Azure.
  • Ensure that your on-premise workloads have access to replicate to Azure and any ports are open on your firewall.
  • Install the Azure Site Recovery Provider on any source VMs you wish to replicate to Azure.
  • Create a Replication Policy, which includes replication frequency and recovery point retention.
  • Once Replication is running, run a Test Failover using an isolated network to ensure your replicated VMs are in a consistent state.
  • Once the Test Failover is completed, run a full failover to Azure. This will make Azure your Primary Site, and will replicate any changes back to your on-premise VMs. Once this is completed, you can fail back to make the on-premise VMs your Primary Site again, and the data will be consistent! Pretty Cool!!

Service Features

Azure Site Recovery includes the following features to help ensure your workloads keep running in the event of outages:

  • Replication from On-Premise-Azure, Azure-Azure, AWS to Azure.
  • Workload Replication from supported Azure, AWS or On-Premise VM or Physical Server.
  • RPO and RTO targets in line with your business and audit requirements.
  • Flexible failover and Non-Disruptive testing.

Conclusion

Azure Site Recovery can play a key role in the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery strategy for your business. A full overview of Azure Site Recovery can be found here, and for a full demo of the service, contact your local Microsoft Partner.

Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!!