What Is Azure Site Recovery

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What Is Azure Site Recovery

In this azure tutorial, we will discuss what is azure site recovery. Along with that, we will also discuss a few other topics as below

  • Features of Azure Site Recovery
  • Azure Site Recovery Step By Step
  • How do I set up Azure Site Recovery?
  • Azure Site Recovery Architecture
  • Azure Site Recovery Limitations
  • What does azure site recovery provides for virtual machines
  • Azure Site Recovery Cost

What Is Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery is an excellent service from Microsoft that helps you to keep the workloads and business apps running in case of any outages or failures so that they won’t affect the business.

Basically, the service replicates the workloads running in your VMs to a different location from the primary site.

Now, in case of any failover in your primary site, it accesses the apps from the other location so that everything continues as it is.

Once your primary site works as expected, you can failback to the prime site.

The overall aim is to safe and make available your workloads and the apps always even in case of any failures so that your business continues as it is.

Features of Azure Site Recovery

There are many excellent features provided by Azure Site Recovery. Let’s discuss here a few key features that azure site recovery provides.

Replication Of Azure VM

Azure Site Recovery provides you the opportunity to configure disaster recovery for your Azure Virtual Machines from one location or region to another secondary location. So that in case of any disaster or failure, you can save your Data.

Replication for Workloads

You can also able to replicate any of the workloads running on your Virtual machines or Physical servers so that it will not affect your business.

Quick BCDR Solution

Using Azure Portal, you can quickly configure and manage the failover, replication and then you can failback from a single place. If you are looking for a quick BCDR Solution, then Azure Site Recovery is one of the best options.

Customized Recovery Plans

You can get the opportunity to customize the recovery plans based on your need like you can set the sequence of failover and recovery for multi-tier applications that are running on different virtual machines, etc.

Not only that, but you can also easily integrate your recovery plans with your Azure Automation runbooks based on your need.

Seamless integration with BCDR technologies

If you want to use any other BCDR technologies, Azure Site Recovery can seamlessly integrate with any other BCDR technologies.

Replication Of Your On-premises VM

Azure Site Recovery can also help you to replicate your on-premises Virtual Machines and physical servers to Azure or to another data center that helps you to save a lot of costs.

Azure site recovery prerequisites

Well, you should make sure, you have the prerequisites needed to enable Azure Site Recovery.

Azure Site Recovery Step By Step

Well let’s discuss here, How do I set up Azure Site Recovery?. Follow the below steps to configure Azure site recovery.

  1. Create a Recovery Services vault.
  2. Now, to enable the site Recovery, click on the “+ Enable Site Recovery” button on the Recovery services vault page.
azure site recovery provides what for virtual machines

3. Next, to enable the replication, click on the “Enable replication” under Azure virtual machines as shown below.

How do I set up Azure Site Recovery

4. On the Enable replication window –> Source tab, select the below options

  • Source location: Select the source region or location where your Virtual Machine is running currently.
  • Azure virtual machine deployment model: Select Resource Manager option.
  • Source subscription: Select the source subscription that your virtual machine belongs to.
  • Source Resource Group: Select the Resource group that your Virtual Machine belongs to.
  • Disaster Recovery between Availability Zones?: Keep the default option as “No”.

Finally, click on the Next button to navigate to the Virtual machines tab.

How to set up Azure Site Recovery

5. On the Virtual Machines tab, select the virtual machine or all the virtual machines that you want to use for the disaster recovery, and then click on the Next button to move to the replication settings window.

6. On the Replication Settings window, review the replication settings and click on the Enable replication button.

Azure Site Recovery Architecture

Well, let’s discuss the architecture of the Azure Site Recovery for your Azure Virtual Machines and the different components involved as part of the Azure Site Recovery Architecture.

Replication Process

Architecture of Azure Site Recovery

In Case of Failover

Azure Site Recovery Architecture

Main Components Of the Azure Site Recovery Architecture

Below are the main components that are part of Azure Site Recovery architecture.

Source Environments

The lists of main components for the source environments.

Source Region Virtual Machines

The list of Azure Virtual machines that are running on the suppoted source region with the supported operating systems.

Storage for your Source Virtual Machines

The managed or non managed disks of the Azure Virtual machines.

VNets For your Source Virtual Machines

The subnets in side the virtual network where your source Azure Virtual Machine is located.

Cache storage account

During the process of replication, the changes in the Virtual machines are initially stored in the Cache storage then the changes are being stored in the target storage. This is the reason Cache storage accounts play a vital role in the source Environment.

Destination Environments

Below are the components for the Destination environments.

You can get the opportunity to create the resources in the target automatically from the Site Recovery at the moment you are trying to enable the replication for a Virtual Machine.

Target subscription

The subscription should be the same as the Source subscription.

Resource Group For the Target

A new resource group is created by the Site Recovery in the destination region with the suffix “asr”.

VNet For the Target

The virtual network where your Virtual machines are going to store once after the failover.

Storage Account For the Target

The storage account where the data is going to replicate in the target environment in case your virtual machine is not using the managed disk.

Replica Managed Disk For the Target

This is the replica of the managed disk in the target where the data is replicated.

Azure Site Recovery Limitations

Let’s discuss here, some limitations of Azure Site Recovery.

  •  Clustered disks are not supported by Azure Site Recovery.

You can find out some more information on Azure Site Recovery Limitations now.

What does azure site recovery provides for virtual machines

Azure Site Recovery mainly provides fault tolerance for virtual machines.

Azure Site Recovery Cost

Basically, Azure site recovery pricing depends on the number of instances that are protected.

Note: For the initial 31 days, you do not need to pay for the instances that are protected using Azure Site Recovery. You need to pay after 31 days.

Below are the azure site recovery pricing details.

Instance DetailsInitial 31 daysAfter 31 days
In the case of ASR for customer-owned sitesFreeYou need to pay ₹1,152.725/month/instance.
In the case of ASR to AzureFreeYou need to pay ₹1,801.132/month/instance.

You can check out the complete pricing details for the Azure Site Recovery now.

Azure Site Recovery RTO

RTO is recovery time objectives. When you wish to configure disaster recovery for your critical application. You need to do the configuration in such a way that the RTO should be low and thats where the Azure Traffic Manager comes into the picture.

So, along with the Azure Site Recovery, you can use the Azure traffic manager to reduce the RTO for your critical application during a disaster. Note that recovery time objectives or the RTO is a very important factor.

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Wrapping Up

Well, in this article, we have discussed what is azure site recovery and along with that, we have also discussed the below topics

  • Features of Azure Site Recovery
  • Azure site recovery prerequisites
  • Azure Site Recovery Step By Step
  • How do I set up Azure Site Recovery?
  • Azure Site Recovery Architecture
  • Azure Site Recovery Limitations
  • What does azure site recovery provides for virtual machines
  • Azure Site Recovery Cost
  • Azure Site Recovery RTO

Hope you have enjoyed this article !!!