Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service that runs on the Microsoft Azure platform. It provides services like virtual machines, SQL databases and various other online applications to allow users to access these via an internet connection for low costs. Disaster recovery is the process of setting up plans in order to protect your data from unexpected outages or disasters by having infrastructure located near your business or home office.,
Azure Site Recovery is a service that Microsoft offers to help you set up an Azure Disaster Recovery Plan. This article will take you through the steps for setting up your disaster recovery plan with Azure Site Recovery.
Do you have nightmares about data loss because of your disaster recovery solution? Do you have confidence in your Azure disaster recovery plan? Are you interested in learning more about Azure Site Recovery? If that’s the case, this lesson is for you.
This post will walk you through Azure Site Recovery and walk you through a step-by-step example of using Azure Site Recovery on Azure virtual machines.
Prerequisites
If you want to follow along with the practical demonstrations in this course, you’ll need the following:
- Two Azure virtual machines in the same Azure region, which might be either Linux or Windows. This lesson will use VMs in the UK South Azure region that will fail over to the UK West Azure zone.
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- A resource group in Azure — This lesson will make use of the rgacmecompany-dr resource group.
How does Azure Site Recovery work?
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) solution for Azure virtual machines, hybrid cloud, and associated workloads that may help you recover from Azure disasters. Azure Site Recovery keeps an up-to-date duplicate of your data in a different Azure region or availability zone after it’s set up.
ASR continually replicates data from one site to another in practically real-time to keep an always current copy of your data in a different Azure data center (as low as 30 seconds). When disaster hits and you have no choice but to utilize the backup site, AST allows you to fail over to the secondary site.
ASR provides a number of failover alternatives to assist you meet your Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO). You may describe any resource requirements, such as an application server that relies on a database backend, by enabling you to construct recovery groups inside a recovery plan.
Overview of the Planning Your Site Recovery Tutorial
You must first develop a recovery plan before you can use ASR for your Azure disaster recovery requirements. A recovery plan specifies how you will failover and failback resources.
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This guide will shortly show how to set up Azure disaster recovery using ASR for two Azure virtual machines that are connected to the same virtual network (vNet).
The next parts will show you how to build up ASR from the ground up. The following will be shown in this tutorial:
- ASR vault creation.
- Installing the ASR extension on each VM so it can connect to your ASR vault.
- VM disks are replicated to temporary storage in the same area.
- Sending VM disks to the secondary region’s target replica disks or a storage account.
- Creating virtual machines from the secondary region’s duplicate disks.
Virtual machines are not generated until the failover is complete.
Azure Site Recovery provides a disaster recovery strategy.
Don’t worry if this seems difficult at first; as you go through each phase, the reference graphic should assist you grasp the process.
Creating A Vault For Recovery Services
You will establish a Services Recovery Vault in this part. The vault holds the replication settings and monitors the replication process as it happens. The vault is in the backup region to avoid losing it along with your other data if the Azure region goes down.
The vault is in charge of the whole failover and recovery process for the site.
To make the ASR vault, first:
1. Log in to your Azure Cloud Account using the Azure Portal in your web browser.
2. Type recovery into the search field, as shown below, and then choose Recovery Service Vaults to access the ASR vault page.
Open the Vault of Recovery Services
3. Click Create on the ASR vault page.
Create a recovery vault for Services.
4. Fill up the information for the ASR vault and then click Review + Create.
- Create a new resource group for your vault or use one that already exists.
- Give the vault a name that is favorable to you. A prefix of RSV will be used in the lesson, followed by the resource group name depending on an organizational necessity.
- Provide the destination area for the site where it will failover. UK West will be used in this lesson.
Putting together the vault
Azure generates a deployment to construct and configure the vault according to your requirements. You will see that the deployment is complete within a few minutes.
5. To access the vault for additional settings, click Go To Resource.
established a vault for recovery services
Replication Enablement (Site Recovery)
After you’ve built a vault, you’ll need to configure it by activating replication, also known as Site Recovery in Azure.
1. Click Allow for site healing. on your ASR vault page, as illustrated below.
Make a site rehabilitation plan.
Your Recovery Services Vault will open and provide you the replication choices.
2. As indicated below, click Enable replication. This tutorial solely covers cloning Azure virtual machines.
Allow for site healing.
3. Finally, activate replication by providing all of the appropriate setup information.
- The Azure area where the VMs are now hosted is known as the source location.
- Azure virtual machine deployment model – The technique through which Azure will failover VMs to the backup location. Classic or Resource Manager are your choices. Classic deployment is obsolete and should be avoided; instead, use Resource Manager.
- The subscription you wish to utilize for this lesson is called Source Subscription.
- The source resource group is where the VMs are now located.
- Is it possible to recover from a disaster across availability zones? – To set up catastrophe recovery from zone to zone. If you choose Yes, ASR will duplicate the VMs to the same region. Choose No since this lesson will demonstrate cross-region replication.
- If you pick No for the preceding choice, the Availability Zones option is greyed off. You would choose a different availability zone if this option was enabled.
Options for activating replication configuration
4. In the Source resource group given above, choose the virtual machines you want to clone and click Next. The source resource group for this lesson contains two virtual machines.
Virtual machine selection
5. Select the backup area for the virtual machines. UK West will be used in this lesson.
ASR will duplicate the source resource group by default. You may customize how it duplicates resources in the group by selecting Customize.
Virtual machines are enabled.
The Replication Policy may be found by scrolling down the page. The replication policy, termed 24-hour-retention-policy by default, specifies different replication periods.
- Name – A name for the replication policy that may be customized.
- Retention of Recovery Points – The amount of time ASR maintains recovery points. A recovery point is a moment in time where your data might be recovered. ASR will keep the recovery points for 24 hours in this scenario.
- App consistent snapshot frequency — The time between app-consistent snapshots taken by ASR. To record the whole state of a VM, app-consistent snapshots capture disk activity, data in memory, and any transactions in progress.
Retention options
- This parameter may be set to either Manual or Allow ASR to Manage. Allow ASR to handle should be left alone for this case. Allowing the ASR to handle updates ensures that the extension installed on each virtual machine is always up to date.
- This option is for any automation account that you’d want ASR to use to do certain activities.
Extension preferences
6. When you’ve finished configuring all of the replication options, click Enable Replication. A few things happen after ASR starts the replicating process:
- To connect with each VM, ASR installs the ASR extension.
- The ASR addon creates a Site Recovery vault account.
- With the suffix -asr, ASR generates a resource group.
- The managed disks for each VM and vNet are created by ASR, and their names are prefixed with “-asr.”
- While the VMs are being replicated, disk writes are sent to a local storage account in the source area that operates as a dedicated cache. These writes are handled before being transmitted to your chosen failover area.
- The vault takes the data from local storage and delivers it to an ASR-created storage account or managed disks in the target region.
- ASR generates crash-consistent recovery points every five minutes. Only what was on the disk at the moment of the snapshot is included in a crash-consistent snapshot. Unlike an app-consistent snapshot, it does not contain anything in memory.
Finally, go to the ASR resource group to examine all of the materials created by ASR.
During replication, resources are produced.
Replication Status Check
After you’ve enabled replication, keep an eye on it to make sure it’s operating properly.
Navigate to the recovery services vault on your Azure Portal dashboard by entering recovery in the search box. Because your data is being replicated, it may take some time before you see your resources recognized as healthy and secure. As seen below.
A warning will appear in Failover Health (seen below), indicating that a test failover has not yet been executed.
Replication Status Check
Conclusion
How do you believe Azure Site Recovery might fit into your existing business continuity strategy now that you have a better grasp of how it works? Are you sleeping better now that you know about a reliable backup and disaster recovery solution?
You should read the following piece in this two-part series on how to failover your site now that you’ve set up ASR! Clean up the ASR resources if you don’t want to learn how to failover the site.
“The “azure disaster recovery plan pdf” is a document that will provide you with the steps to set up an Azure Disaster Recovery Plan. The document can be found on Microsoft’s website.”
Related Tags
- azure site recovery plan
- azure site recovery for azure virtual machines
- azure site recovery for a linux virtual machine running on the vmware platform
- azure site recovery replication policy
- azure site recovery prerequisites
