Azure

Azure Site Recovery – Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Azure Site Recovery is a native disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) that helps your application running during planned and unplanned outages. Every organization needs a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy that keeps your data safe, and your apps and workloads online, when planned and unplanned outages occur. AZURE Site Recovery offers ease of deployment, cost-effectiveness, and dependability and it will help you to deploy replication, failover, and recovery processes through Site Recovery.

Using Site Recovery, you can deploy application-aware replication to the cloud, or to a secondary site. You can use Site Recovery to manage replication, perform disaster recovery testing, and run failovers and failback. Your apps can run on Windows or Linux-based computers, physical servers, VMware, or Hyper-V. Site Recovery integrates with Microsoft applications such as SharePoint, Exchange, Dynamics, SQL Server, and Active Directory.

An organization can replicate their Azure VM to a different Azure region directly from the Azure portal using Site Recovery. As a fully integrated offering, Site Recovery is automatically updated with new Azure features as they’re released.

Azure Recovery Services BCDR Strategy

Site Recovery Service

Site Recovery helps ensure business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages. Site Recovery replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VMs) from a primary site to a secondary location. When an outage occurs at your primary site, you failover to secondary location, and access apps from there. After the primary location is running again, you can fail back to it.

Backup service

The Azure Backup service keeps your data safe and recoverable.

Site Recovery can manage replication for:

Azure VMs replicating between Azure regions.
On-premises VMs, Azure Stack VMs, and physical servers.

Azure Site Recovery Offering

Feature	Details
Simple BCDR solution	Using Site Recovery, you can set up and manage replication, failover, and failback from a single location in the Azure portal.
Azure VM replication	You can set up disaster recovery of Azure VMs from a primary region to a secondary region.
On-premises VM replication	You can replicate on-premises VMs and physical servers to Azure, or to a secondary on-premises datacenter. Replication to Azure eliminates the cost and complexity of maintaining a secondary datacenter.
Workload replication	Replicate any workload running on supported Azure VMs, on-premises Hyper-V and VMware VMs, and Windows/Linux physical servers.
Data resilience	Site Recovery orchestrates replication without intercepting application data. When you replicate to Azure, data is stored in Azure storage, with the resilience that provides. When failover occurs, Azure VMs are created, based on the replicated data.
RTO and RPO targets	Keep recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) within organizational limits. Site Recovery provides continuous replication for Azure VMs and VMware VMs, and replication frequency as low as 30 seconds for Hyper-V. You can reduce RTO further by integrating with Azure Traffic Manager.
Keep apps consistent over failover	You can replicate using recovery points with application-consistent snapshots. These snapshots capture disk data, all data in memory, and all transactions in process.
Testing without disruption	You can easily run disaster recovery drills, without affecting ongoing replication.
Flexible failovers	You can run planned failovers for expected outages with zero-data loss. Or, unplanned failovers with minimal data loss, depending on replication frequency, for unexpected disasters. You can easily fail back to your primary site when it’s available again.
Customized recovery plans	Using recovery plans, you can customize and sequence the failover and recovery of multi-tier applications running on multiple VMs. You group machines together in a recovery plan, and optionally add scripts and manual actions. Recovery plans can be integrated with Azure automation runbooks.
BCDR integration	Site Recovery integrates with other BCDR technologies. For example, you can use Site Recovery to protect the SQL Server backend of corporate workloads, with native support for SQL Server AlwaysOn, to manage the failover of availability groups.
Azure automation integration	A rich Azure Automation library provides production-ready, application-specific scripts that can be downloaded and integrated with Site Recovery.
Network integration	Site Recovery integrates with Azure for application network management. For example, to reserve IP addresses, configure load-balancers, and use Azure Traffic Manager for efficient network switchovers.

Azure Site Recovery supported below replication scenarios.

Supported	Details
Replication scenarios	Replicate Azure VMs from one Azure region to another. Replicate on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers (Windows and Linux), Azure Stack VMs to Azure. Replicate AWS Windows instances to Azure. Replicate on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs managed by System Center VMM, and physical servers to a secondary site.
Regions	Review supported regions for Site Recovery.
Replicated machines	Review the replication requirements for Azure VM replication, on-premises VMware VMs and physical servers, and on-premises Hyper-V VMs.
Workloads	You can replicate any workload running on a machine that’s supported for replication. And, the Site Recovery team did app-specific tests for a number of apps.

Conclusion

An Organization can Minimize recovery issues by sequencing the order of multi-tier applications running on multiple virtual machines. Ensure compliance by testing your disaster recovery plan without impacting production workloads or end-users. And keep applications available during outages with automatic recovery from on-premises to Azure or Azure to another Azure region.

Microsoft been recognized as a leader in DRaaS based on completeness of vision and ability to execute by Gartner in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service. Microsoft works closely with leading vendors including Oracle, SAP, and Red Hat. You can customize replication solutions on an app-by-app basis

Rajesh Radhakrishnan