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Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ASR): What you need to know

Disaster recovery
Nerdio Manager for MSP

One of the most common questions we get from managed service providers (MSPs) who are in the process of building a cloud practice in Microsoft Azure is “What is Azure Site Recovery (ASR) and when should I use it?”

Let’s review this important Azure service from Microsoft and its relevance to MSPs.

Why does Azure Site Recovery exist?

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is Microsoft’s Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution built specifically for Azure workloads. ASR enables companies to recover from catastrophes quickly with minimal downtime. ASR can also be used as a tool to migrate existing servers into Azure from an on-premises environment or migrate workloads between Azure regions and resource groups.

Who is Azure Site Recovery designed for?

  • Companies that need to meet specific requirements or regulations for their industry such as ISO 27001
  • Companies who are sensitive to downtime or want to limit impact from region-specific Azure outages
  • Companies who wish to migrate current workloads into Azure from an on-premises environment, between Azure regions, or between resource groups
  • Anyone seeking a complete business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy for their business

When can Azure Site Recovery be used?

  • Replication of Azure VMs from one Azure region to another
  • Replication of on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical Windows and Linux servers, and Azure Stack VMs to Azure
  • Replication of on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs managed by System Center VMM, and physical servers to a secondary site.
  • Replication of specific workloads running on a machine that’s supported for replication

What are some of the key features of Azure Site Recovery?

  • A simple BCDR solution – ASR is built into Azure and can be managed entirely from within a single location
  • Data Resilience – Data is replicated inside of Azure storage with all the resilience and security provided by Azure
  • RTO and RPO Targets – Manage and meet organizational RTO/RPO targets with continuous replication at intervals as low as 30 seconds for Hyper-V servers
  • Easy and Flexible Failover– Test failover and disaster recovery scenarios without disrupting replication
    • Failovers can also be planned for expected outages with zero-data loss
    • Unplanned failovers can happen with minimal data loss and fail back to your primary site can be done easily when it’s available again

How do I set up a basic Azure Site Recovery replication?

Enable replication for an Azure VM

  • In the Azure portal, click Virtual machines, and select the VM you want to replicate
  • In Operations, click Disaster recovery
  • In Configure disaster recovery > Target region select the target region to which you’ll replicate
  • For this QuickStart, accept the other default settings
  • Click Enable replication. This starts a job to enable replication for the VM

Verify your settings

  • After the replication job has finished, you can check the replication status, modify replication settings, and test the deployment
    • In the VM menu, click Disaster recovery
    • You can verify replication health, the recovery points that have been created, source, and target regions on the map

Clean up resources/stop replication

  • The VM in the primary region stops replicating when you disable replication for it:
    • The source replication settings are cleaned up automatically. The Site Recovery extension installed on the VM as part of the replication isn’t removed and must be removed manually.
    • Site Recovery billing for the VM stops

Stop replication as follows

  • Select the VM
  • In Disaster recovery, click Disable Replication

Where can I get more information on Azure Site Recovery?

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