Azure site recovery is a service that contributes to your business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy by replicating on-premises workloads and applications to the cloud. It can automatically recover them in the event of a failure, or fail back to on-premises hardware when you’re ready. You can replicate Windows and Linux virtual machines, physical servers, VMware, and Hyper-V servers.
You can also use it to protect a hybrid environment by replicating on-premises VMs and virtual networks to the cloud, and then recover them to your primary datacenter when you’re ready. With a best-in-class Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of seconds to minutes for general operations, you can ensure that your apps are up and running after a disaster.
To use azure site recovery, you need an Azure subscription and a target region in which to create the replicas. You also need an Azure storage account to store the replication data, and a virtual network to host the replicas. You must also plan for capacity to ensure that your VMs have enough resources in the target region for optimal performance. You should test the configuration of azure site recovery regularly.
During the deployment process, you can select which Azure services to include in your replication policy, and specify a retention history for the recovery points. You can also use the azure site recovery dashboard to monitor the status of your replication and recovery.
When you fail over a VM, the data is consistent for both the operating system and applications. This consistency depends on the type of snapshots that you take. You can choose to take crash-consistent snapshots by default, or app-consistent snapshots if you select them in your replication policy. The frequency of these snapshots is defined by your replication schedule.
Security is a key element of the azure site recovery architecture. During the replication process, your data is encrypted in transit and at rest. It’s also protected by other mechanisms, such as checksums that verify the integrity of transferred data. This protection helps prevent malware from tampering with the data during transfer to the target.
Once your azure site recovery is deployed, you can run disaster recovery drills to test the replication and failover processes. These tests help you reduce your RTO and improve your recovery readiness. You can even use azure automation features to automate the failover process, so you don’t need any human intervention.
To deploy azure site recovery, you need to follow best practices and understand the architecture and components. You should document your recovery process, and perform regular disaster recovery drills to ensure that you can recover from a disaster or outage. Finally, you should follow security best practices to protect your data, such as encrypting data in transit and at rest and properly securing access to the recovery site. You should also consider the support process, and train your staff on how to contact Microsoft Support and escalate issues to appropriate personnel. This can help you avoid prolonged downtime caused by trying to work out the process on the fly.