Azure Site Recovery: Achieve Disaster Recovery with Azure
Introduction
Data protection is critical. It’s hard to predict when a disaster will occur and how serious it will impact your organization. However, you can plan for a business continuity plan and control the way your organization recovers from a disaster. Azure Site Recovery is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offered by Microsoft, which allows your workloads to be replicated into Azure or secondary on-prem sites.
Azure Disaster Recovery provides business continuity for your organization during an outage by replicating workloads running on both physical and virtual machines from a primary site to a secondary site.
If there’s an outage at the primary site, you can access your applications from the secondary site without any downtime.
In this article, we will discuss the below points :
- Azure Site Recovery Functionalities
- Demo: Replicating an Azure VM to a secondary site.
- What can you replicate using Azure Site Recovery?
- Why should you consider Azure Site Recovery?
Azure Site Recovery Functionalities
Azure site recovery provides two types of functionalities:
Replication: It synchronizes the contents of your VM on a secondary site.
Orchestration: This is responsible for the failover and failback process between the primary and secondary sites in case of a failure of the primary site due to disaster.
In this blog, we will replicate Azure VM to a secondary region using ASR.
Demo
In this demo, we will replicate an Azure VM created in the EAST US region to the WEST US region by using Azure Site Recovery.
Prerequisites :
- Azure Subscription — You can use Azure Free subscription for this demo.
- An Azure VM in the East US region.
Go to your virtual machine resource and select the ‘Disaster Recovery’ blade option. This will ask for the Target region which is going to be your secondary site.
Click on ‘Advanced settings’. Here we need to configure the below sections :
- Target settings: This section is used for configuring your Target resource Subscription, Resource group, Vnet, Availability, and Proximity placement.
- Storage settings: This section is used for configuring your cache storage account and the replica disks for your resource.
- Replication settings: This section is used for configuring your Azure recovery vault and replication policy.
- Extension settings: This section is used for configuring your Azure automation account.
After configuring all the above sections, you can click on ‘Create’ and Azure will start configuring the replication, which involves multiples deployments and configurations of the required resources like Azure recovery vault, Azure automation account, etc.
Once the replication is set up and completed, it will perform the initial synchronization. You can check the status of your replication and Infrastructure view on the ‘Disaster recovery’ section of your virtual machine resource.
You can also search the ‘Recovery service vault’ resource in your Azure subscription and check for the replicated items and it’s health. This section will allow you to monitor your replicated resources’ health and add other resources for replication.
What can you replicate using Azure Site Recovery?
- Azure VM to Azure: Automatically replicate your VMs from one Azure region to another region when you experience any downtime.
- On-premises servers to Azure: Automatically replicate your physical servers and on-prem virtual machines to an Azure VM with nearly zero downtime.
- On-prem servers on primary site to on-premises secondary site: You can use Azure Site Recovery to migrate your data between the primary and other on-prem sites.
Why should you consider Azure Site Recovery?
- Convenient Replication and Testing
You can easily run disaster recovery (Business Continuity Plan) drills without affecting ongoing replication from a primary to a secondary site. ASR allows you to run failover and recovery testing without impacting your production environment or spending extra money on extra resources for the BCP drill exercise. This gives you an extra confidence level to understand if your failovers will work seamlessly in a real disaster scenario.
- Simple Deployment and Management — ‘One portal to rule them all.’
ASR lets you manage all disaster recovery-related plans and activities from the Azure portal. The console gives you a holistic overview of all your replicated workloads.
If you’re already using the Azure platform, it is ideal to use Azure site recovery.
- High availability and Instant support
ASR guarantees 99.9% Service availability and 24x7 support from Microsoft. It also promises low recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)
- Automated data protection and replication of VMs and Physical servers
ASR provides application-consistent snapshots recovery points to replicate your workloads. These snapshots capture disk data, all data in memory, and all transactions in process.
- Automated failover and recovery with the help of health monitoring of the Disaster recovery site
Using ASR, you can run planned failovers for expected outages with zero-data loss or unplanned failovers with minimal or no data loss, depending on configurations like replication frequency for unexpected disasters. You can quickly failback to your primary site when it’s available again after verification of the availability of the primary site.
- Customizable DR Plans
ASR lets you create customized recovery plans, which you can use to customize the actions during the failover and recovery of N-tier applications running on multiple VMs. You can group various VMs in a recovery plan and optionally add scripts and manual activities as needed. ASR also provides integration with Azure Automation.
- Cost-Effective
Azure site recovery eliminates the need for a secondary data center used for DR exercises, eliminating all the cost resources associated with maintaining a secondary site. You can also pre-assess resources like storage, network, and compute you need to replicate applications from your on-prem setup to Azure and choose to only pay for what’s required during outages.
Conclusion
Azure Site Recovery is a powerful service in Azure that every organization should be taking advantage of. To create a BC-DR plan using ASR, make sure you understand your infrastructure and how you want it to be replicated. Businesses with complex hybrid cloud setups who want to ensure continuity between on-premises and cloud setups with zero room for downtime can use Azure site recovery as their BC-DR tool.
