Microsoft Azure Site Recovery: A Comprehensive Guide

Microsoft Azure Site Recovery is a cloud-based disaster recovery service that replicates and recovers on-premises virtual machines to Azure. It's designed to ensure business continuity by minimizing downtime and data loss.

Azure Site Recovery supports replication of VMware vSphere and Hyper-V virtual machines, as well as physical servers, to Azure. This means you can protect a wide range of workloads, from small applications to large-scale enterprise environments.

To get started with Azure Site Recovery, you'll need to set up a recovery services vault in the Azure portal. This is where you'll configure and manage your replication and recovery settings.

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Microsoft Azure Site Recovery is a service based in Microsoft's Azure cloud platform that helps customers replicate their on-premises servers to Azure.

It supports replication of Windows and Linux VMs running on VMware or Hyper-V, as well as physical Windows or Linux servers.

A key benefit is that VMs can fail over and continue to operate in the Azure cloud in the event of a disaster, such as a power outage or hardware failure.

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Azure Site Recovery also replicates Azure VM workloads.

The service includes an agent that facilitates the replication process and assists with tasks related to configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

It supports application-aware replication for Microsoft products like Exchange, SQL Server, and Active Directory, as well as major vendors like Oracle, SAP, and IBM.

Azure Site Recovery offers integration with the admin portal, making it easy to configure beyond agent installation. This integration is a major advantage for Microsoft-based shops.

One of the real advantages of Azure Site Recovery is its constant development as a cloud-based service. Microsoft introduced Azure Site Recovery in 2014 and issues rollups nearly every month to add features or improve functionality.

You can test disaster recovery options in a safe environment with Azure Site Recovery, which can help you avoid potential downtime and give you peace of mind. This feature is especially useful for testing your disaster recovery plans without impacting your primary systems.

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Azure Site Recovery can help you recover your business services in a timely and orchestrated manner in the event of a service disruption or data corruption. It can also integrate with your on-premises data protection solutions for end-to-end coverage.

Azure Site Recovery backs up your data every 30 seconds, giving your organization a higher Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). This means you're less likely to lose substantial amounts of work and will recover faster in the event of an outage.

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Microsoft charges for Azure Site Recovery based on the number of protected instances.

You can test the service for free for the first 31 days, which is a great way to try it out without committing to a cost.

Each protected instance to Azure costs $25 per month, with additional fees for the Azure Site Recovery license, storage in Azure, storage transactions, and outbound data transfer.

For a protected instance to a customer-owned site, the cost is $16 per instance, which is a lower rate compared to Azure.

Microsoft doesn't charge for incoming replication, but does charge for outgoing replication, which depends on the Azure region and egress data transferred.

Each attached disk to the instance adds to the charges, with faster disk types costing more.

During a failover, Microsoft adds a compute charge for the VMs that are running in Azure, which is an extra fee to consider.

To get started with Azure Site Recovery, you'll need an active subscription to Azure. This is the foundation upon which the entire setup is built.

You'll also need to have an Azure virtual network to place your VMs in a failover, as well as a storage account to hold replicated data. This is crucial for the recovery process to work smoothly.

Here are some key prerequisites to keep in mind:

If you're working with VMware VMs or physical servers, you'll also need a configuration server to handle replication to Azure. This server is set up as a highly available VMware VM and uses a registration key from the recovery vault for access.

To use Azure Site Recovery, you'll need an active subscription to Azure. This is the first requirement to get started.

In order to set up a failover, you'll need an Azure virtual network to place your VMs in. This network is essential for disaster recovery.

A storage account is also necessary to hold replicated data. This is a critical component of the Azure Site Recovery process.

For replication of VMware VMs and physical servers, a configuration server is required. This server must be set up as a highly available VMware VM.

A registration key from the recovery vault is also needed for access to the configuration server.

In Azure Site Recovery, you can define different configuration items for the target environment, even after setting up replication.

You can define the target VM SKU during replication setup, leave it set to automatic, or modify it after replication setup. When set to automatic, ASR will select a VM SKU that is the same or similar based on resource availability in the target region.

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The target resource group can also be defined during replication setup or left set to automatic, in which case the service will create a new resource group or modify an existing one after replication setup.

You can modify the target subnet after replication setup, but the service automatically assigns the VM to a subnet based on the source VM subnet setup.

The target disk type can be defined during replication setup, and the service automatically selects the disk type based on the source disk setup, but you can change it if required during replication setup.

Here are the configuration items that can be defined during replication setup or modified afterwards:

You can define a replication policy based on your application, workload, or recovery point objective (RPO) requirements. This policy determines how far back in time ASR allows for recovery, with a maximum supported recovery-point retention duration of 15 days for managed disks and 3 days for unmanaged disks.

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The higher the recovery-point retention period, the more data that is retained for that VM, and therefore the more you are charged for the storage used by the service. Crash-consistent recovery points are snapshots of the state of the VM disk taken and sent to the target region, but they do not capture the data in memory.

App-consistent recovery points, on the other hand, are snapshots of the on-disk data along with all processes, data, and transactions running in memory. They are captured using the Volume Shadow Copy Service on Windows Servers and take longer than crash-consistent snapshots.

You can set up your replication configuration to use a replication policy when setting up replication. The policy will determine the frequency of app-consistent recovery points, with a minimum frequency supported of 1 hour and a default setting of 4 hours.

In the event of a disaster in the primary region, you can failover the Azure VM to the target region using the ASR service. The target VM will then be created based on the settings you’ve defined and the replicated data.

A test failover creates a VM in a test network defined by you, with the replicated data, but it does not commit write operations to the replication data. This enables you to make changes to the test VM without affecting the primary server or the replication in any way.

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A planned failover brings the VM online in the secondary region and allows changes to the VM to be committed to disk. While the changes are not replicated to the primary region, replication from the primary site is stopped.

You can replicate Azure VMs from one Azure region to another, as well as from Azure Public MEC to the Azure region it's connected to. You can also replicate on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers (Windows and Linux), Azure Stack VMs to Azure, and AWS Windows instances to Azure.

Here are the supported replication scenarios: