To have an adequate business continuity and disaster recovery strategy that helps keep running applications and restore normal working conditions when it is necessary to perform maintenance activities planned or unplanned stoppages is crucial.
Azure Site Recovery promotes l ’ implementation of these strategies by orchestrating the replicas of virtual machines and physical servers present in your data center. You have the option of replicating servers and virtual machines that reside on a local primary data center to the cloud (Microsoft Azure) or to a secondary data center.
If you experience interruptions in the primary data center you can initiate a failover process to keep workloads accessible and available. When will it be possible to use the resources in the primary data center will handle the failback process.
Replication scenarios
The following scenarios are covered in Azure replication Site Recovery:
- Hyper-V virtual machine replication
In this scenario if Hyper-V virtual machines are managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) You can expect the replica to a secondary data center and Microsoft Azure. If the virtual machines are managed through VMM, the replica will be possible only to Microsoft Azure.
- Replication of VMware virtual machines
The virtual machines on VMware can be replicated to a secondary data center using a data channel of InMage Scout to Microsoft Azure.
- Replication of physical servers Windows and Linux
The physical servers can be replicated to a secondary data center (using InMage Scout data channel) that to Microsoft Azure.
Figure 1 – Replication scenarios of ASR
Azure configuration Site Recovery
The following table lists the documents with the specifications that you must follow to configure Azure Site Recovery in different scenarios:
| Typology of the systems to be replicated | Replication target |
| VMware virtual machines | Microsoft Azure |
| Managed Hyper-V virtual machines in VMM clouds | Microsoft Azure |
| Managed Hyper-V virtual machines in VMM clouds, with storage on SAN | Secondary data center |
| Hyper-V virtual machines without VMM | Microsoft Azure |
| Local Windows/Linux physical servers | Microsoft Azure |
The main advantages in adopting Azure Site Recovery
After reviewing what can I do with Azure Site Recovery and what steps to follow to implement recovery plans are those that are some of the major benefits that you may have with the adoption of this solution:
- Using the tools of Azure Site Recovery it simplifies the process of creating business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Recovery plans and runbooks can include scripts present in Azure Automation so you can shape and customize your application with DR procedures for complex architectures.
- You can have a high degree of flexibility thanks to the potential of the solution that enables you to orchestrate replicas of physical servers and virtual machines running on Hyper-V and VMware.
- With the ability to replicate the work loads directly on Azure in some cases you may want to completely delete a secondary data center made just for business continuity and disaster recovery.
- You have the option to periodically perform failover test to validate the effectiveness of the recovery plans implemented, without giving any impact to production application environment.
- It is possible to integrate with other technologies existing company ASR BCDR (for example Sql Server AlwaysOn or SAN replication).
Types of Failover on Azure Site Recovery
After creating a plan of recovery you can perform different types of failover. The following table lists the various types of failover and for each is specified its purpose and what action causes the execution process.
Conclusions
Azure Site Recovery is a powerful and flexible solution for creating business continuity and disaster recovery strategies for your data center, able to orchestrate and manage complex and heterogeneous infrastructures. All this makes ASR an appropriate tool for most environments. For those wishing to explore the field of Azure Site Recovery features can activate a trial of environment Operations Management Suite or of Microsoft Azure.
