Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery service that replicates on-premises virtual machines and physical servers to the Microsoft cloud. This can be used to protect against a failure at the on-premises datacenter, or to recover from a disaster that affects the primary region/datacenter. The service also allows for the testing of a disaster recovery plan without disrupting production workloads.
A key benefit of azure site recovery is that it offers continuous replication, reducing the time it takes to recover after a failure. It also supports a quick failback to the on-premises datacenter. The service is available as a pay-as-you-go model, with no upfront costs or long-term contracts. It also supports the use of Azure Reserved Instances to save up to 72% on compute costs.
The solution consists of multiple services that are integrated with each other to deliver a powerful disaster recovery platform. These include Traffic Manager, Azure Active Directory, Site Recovery, Virtual Network, and Blob Storage. Traffic Manager routes DNS traffic, moving it between sites based on policies you define. Site Recovery orchestrates machine replication and handles the configuration of your failover procedures. Azure Active Directory provides a replica of your on-premises directory. Virtual Network provides a secure bridge between on-premises and the Azure infrastructure, allowing you to communicate between the two. Blob Storage stores the replication images of your on-premises servers and any VMs that are protected by Site Recovery.
Before you can start replicating on-premises VMs to Azure, you need to create an Azure Site Recovery vault in your subscription. This vault serves as the management base for the entire Site Recovery deployment. Once you create a vault, you can begin creating protection groups and defining the machines to replicate. You can also set the replication frequency and the target Azure region.
After the on-premises environment is configured, you need to install the Site Recovery provider software. This is a special agent that runs on each of the Hyper-V hosts from which you want to replicate. Once it is installed, the Provider will start replicating on-premises VMs and physical servers to the Microsoft cloud.
Once the machines are replicated to the Azure datacenter, you can test your DR plans by performing a failover. This can be done with a simple click and does not impact the application architecture. If the failover succeeds, you can add a public IP address to the Azure Virtual Machine and point your DNS to it. A sequenced workflow is then executed and the server can be brought back to the on-premises datacenter if needed.
In addition to providing a powerful disaster recovery platform, Azure Site Recovery also offers security features, including the ability to encrypt data in transit and at rest. This can help you meet compliance standards such as ISO and 27001. The Deployment Planner tool helps you analyze your source environment for VMware or Hyper-V environments and plan capacity and scale in the target Azure environment. This can be an important consideration for customers who need to keep applications up and running during a disaster. azure site recovery step by step