There are many reasons to build a resilient IT environment, and while much of the focus is on cyberattacks, natural disasters, equipment failure and human error also cause downtime. Microsoft Azure Site Recovery is a cloud-based service that can help you recover from most types of disruptions by replicating on-premises virtual machines and physical servers to Azure, and then spinning up an instance in your secondary region or data center. The service is scalable and flexible, so it can support your business’s continuity needs regardless of size or complexity.
Achieve a 99.9% availability SLA and a 24×7 global support team to protect your business against any unexpected events, ensuring your services remain up. Reduce costs by eliminating the need for a costly secondary data center, letting you pay only for the resources used during a failover event.
azure site recovery integrates with other Azure services to provide a comprehensive disaster recovery in the cloud solution. It replicates on-premises virtual machines and physical servers and stores the data in Azure Storage. It also uses Azure Networking to automatically create and configure the necessary virtual networks, load balancers, and other networking components for a successful recovery. It can even route DNS traffic to the appropriate destination based on the policies you create.
In addition, it enables you to replicate your on-premises data to other Azure regions. This helps you meet regulatory and compliance standards such as ISO and 27001 by keeping your DR data in the geographically separate region where your operations are located. Azure Site Recovery supports replication across multiple locations within a region and allows you to manage both your primary and secondary sites from the same console.
To get started, you must first set up a site recovery vault as the management basis for your vault. You can create a vault by going to the Recovery Services vault home page in the Azure portal and selecting Enable Site Recovery. Once you’ve enabled the feature, you can then select your on-premises locations and start preparing them to be protected by a site recovery vault. Then you can create a protection group to specify the groups of servers and their locations that are protected by the vault, and a replication policy to determine the frequency at which replication occurs.
Once replication is established, you can enable Azure Site Recovery to automatically install the Mobility service on your servers. You can then enable replication for each server to replicate on-premises VMware VMs and physical servers to Azure. You can choose whether to protect Windows or Linux servers, and you can configure a replication policy that specifies the type of machine (VM or physical), its location on your on-premises network, the frequency at which it’s replicated, and the destination site. You can also specify an RPO threshold in minutes that limits how frequently data recovery points are created.
When you’re ready to test your DR process, you can use a sequenced workflow to spin up the target instance and connect it to your on-premises network. Then you can try out application workloads and confirm your DR configuration, without impacting end users or production workloads. When you’re done testing, you can initiate a manual failback to the original on-premises location.