Recently Azure offered native Disaster Recovery for applications running on IaaS being the first public cloud to offer such a service. This service makes applications region-level resilient to failures via replicating VMs into other regions. Azure Availability Zones and Availability Sets add to Azure Site Recovery to complete resiliency for applications running on Azure VMs.
Advantages of the offering
- No need for infrastructure: Azure subscription provides this functionality by default allowing to avoid extra complexity and costs for deploying, monitoring and maintaining any Disaster Recovery infrastructure.
- Choice of the Disaster Recovery region: replicate IaaS apps running on Azure to any of the supported regions
- Simple automatic Disaster Recovery resource creation: to enable a cross-region DR all one needs to do is select the VMs to be protected, choose a target Azure region and review replication settings. The required resources, such as virtual network and storage are automatically created by ASR.
- Uninterrupted Disaster Recovery drills: ASR’s test failover capability allows to easily perform a DR drill without any impact on the production application as well as on the replication.
- Orchestrated recovery: meet the strict recovery time requirements with ASR’s powerful Recovery Plans
- Advanced monitoring and troubleshooting: easily monitor DR health and failover readiness, and troubleshoot any issues quickly with ASR’s advanced monitoring capabilities
- Comprehensive OS coverage: ASR supports both Windows and Linux operating systems and ensures the latest OS versions are supported.
- Built-in network egress reduction: reduce network egress data by 40 to 80 percent.
- Latest Azure features and automatic updates: Azure Site Recovery supports all Azure features such as classic and resource manager virtual machines, managed and unmanaged disks and large disks updated immediately upon release.
[su_note note_color=”#eeeeee” text_color=”#151212″]Pro Tip: Azure Site Recovery monitoring & automation.[/su_note]
Azure Site Recovery quickstart guide
This quickstart guide describes how to replicate an Azure VM to a different Azure region.
Enable replication for the Azure VM
- Log in to the Azure portal and click Virtual machines, and select the VM to be replicated.
- In Operations, click Disaster recovery.
- In Configure disaster recovery > Target region select the target region to which you’ll replicate.
- Accept the other default settings.
- Click Enable replication to start a job and enable replication for the VM.
Verify your settings
Once the replication job is complete, check the replication status, modify the settings and test your deployment.
- Click Disaster recovery.
- Verify replication health, the recovery points that have been created, and source, and target regions on the map.
Clean up resources
To stop the replication in the primary region:
- Select the VM.
- In Disaster recovery, click Disable Replication.
Site Recovery billing for the VM stops and the source replication settings are cleaned up automatically.
[su_note note_color=”#eeeeee” text_color=”#151212″]Pro Tip: keeping Azure VM Scale Sets performing optimally.[/su_note]
Suggested reading
- Configure Disaster Recovery for Azure VMs (detailed guide)
- Protection Of Machines With Managed Disks Using Azure Site Recovery
- Supported configurations for replicating Azure VMs