Are you sleeping at night worrying about a potential data loss disaster? Implementing the right DRaaS solution could help you avoid losing valuable business data and keep your operations up and running. Azure Site Recovery can be a powerful tool to minimize the impact of unexpected disruptions. It allows businesses to replicate their critical workloads and data to Azure, ensuring that they can recover quickly and continue operations in the face of disaster. This article will walk you through a step-by-step example of how to use azure site recovery step by step to protect an on-premises Hyper-V VM.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offering that orchestrates and automates replication of cloud and on-premises virtual machines to and from Microsoft Azure. ASR provides a cost-effective, easy to deploy and manage solution for protecting your on-premises and cloud-based workloads.
ASR integrates with other Azure services to provide a comprehensive solution that meets your business needs. For instance, ASR can replicate on-premises physical servers and VMware or Hyper-V VMs to Azure and store the replicas in an Azure storage vault. It can also configure network connectivity to support recovered workloads and create a Virtual Network in the destination region. It can even perform a test failover to verify your recovery process without interrupting the production environment.
Depending on the type of source environments you have, ASR can use either continuous replication or scheduled replication. Continuous replication ensures that changes to your critical workloads and data are replicated in near real-time to Azure. This is a great option for businesses that need to meet strict recovery point objectives (RPOs). Scheduled replication is useful when you want to replicate data on a predetermined schedule.
ASR is available in multiple regions worldwide. Each region contains one or more data centers located in proximity to each other. Many regions support availability zones that offer increased resiliency during a failure or outage. It’s important to plan your infrastructure to take advantage of these features to improve the availability of applications in a region or AZ that fails.
In addition to the resiliency benefits of the different regions and AZs, ASR offers a cost-effective approach to implementing a disaster recovery plan. Unlike traditional DR sites, which require dedicated hardware that is identical to the DR site, ASR uses a compute-based model that charges only for protected VMs and the storage where they store data.
To get started with ASR, open the Recovery Services vault in the Azure portal. This vault is the conductor of your DR workflow and holds the settings for how to replicate and restore your workloads. After you enable replication, you can monitor the status of your workloads by visiting the dashboard in the Recovery Services vault. You can see the status of your protection in the Failover Health section. Once your VMs are protected and ready for recovery, you can perform a test failover to check that your backup and recovery works as expected.