Recently Azure offered native Disaster Recovery for applications running on IaaS being the first public cloud to offer such a service. This service makes applications region-level resilient to failures via replicating VMs into other regions. Azure Availability Zones and Availability Sets add to Azure Site Recovery to complete resiliency for applications running on Azure VMs.
![Azure Data Recovery](https://www.netreo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/netreo.loc-dr.png)
Advantages of the offering
- No need for infrastructure: Azure subscription provides this functionality by default allowing to avoid extra complexity and costs for deploying, monitoring and maintaining any Disaster Recovery infrastructure.
- Choice of the Disaster Recovery region: replicate IaaS apps running on Azure to any of the supported regions
- Simple automatic Disaster Recovery resource creation: to enable a cross-region DR all one needs to do is select the VMs to be protected, choose a target Azure region and review replication settings. The required resources, such as virtual network and storage are automatically created by ASR.
- Uninterrupted Disaster Recovery drills: ASR’s test failover capability allows to easily perform a DR drill without any impact on the production application as well as on the replication.
- Orchestrated recovery: meet the strict recovery time requirements with ASR’s powerful Recovery Plans
- Advanced monitoring and troubleshooting: easily monitor DR health and failover readiness, and troubleshoot any issues quickly with ASR’s advanced monitoring capabilities
- Comprehensive OS coverage: ASR supports both Windows and Linux operating systems and ensures the latest OS versions are supported.
- Built-in network egress reduction: reduce network egress data by 40 to 80 percent.
- Latest Azure features and automatic updates: Azure Site Recovery supports all Azure features such as classic and resource manager virtual machines, managed and unmanaged disks and large disks updated immediately upon release.
[su_note note_color=”#eeeeee” text_color=”#151212″]Pro Tip: Azure Site Recovery monitoring & automation.[/su_note]
Azure Site Recovery quickstart guide
This quickstart guide describes how to replicate an Azure VM to a different Azure region.
Enable replication for the Azure VM
- Log in to the Azure portal and click Virtual machines, and select the VM to be replicated.
- In Operations, click Disaster recovery.
- In Configure disaster recovery > Target region select the target region to which you’ll replicate.
- Accept the other default settings.
- Click Enable replication to start a job and enable replication for the VM.
![Replication status](https://www.netreo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/netreo.loc-replication-status.png)
Verify your settings
Once the replication job is complete, check the replication status, modify the settings and test your deployment.
- Click Disaster recovery.
- Verify replication health, the recovery points that have been created, and source, and target regions on the map.
![Replication settings](https://www.netreo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/netreo.loc-replication-settings.png)
Clean up resources
To stop the replication in the primary region:
- Select the VM.
- In Disaster recovery, click Disable Replication.
Site Recovery billing for the VM stops and the source replication settings are cleaned up automatically.
[su_note note_color=”#eeeeee” text_color=”#151212″]Pro Tip: keeping Azure VM Scale Sets performing optimally.[/su_note]
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