Every Organization needs a Strategy for planned and unplanned Outages to keep their workloads, apps, services, data running all the time. This strategy should really assure them to achieve the continuity of services

What is ASR : Disaster recovery Solution Provided by Microsoft Azure

Azure Portal Used for this Demo : Classic

Using Microsoft ASR ( Azure Site Recovery), one can achieve the BCDR ( Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) in a very simple way which is far more efficient compared to the traditional disaster recovery methods

The traditional way to have a disaster recovery plan is to have a on-premise secondary site which has the equal compute and can take the work loads in case of a disaster and replicate the data between primary and secondary sites.

Advantages of having Azure Site recovery :

1. Simple BCDR Strategy
2. Flexibility in Replication
3. Easy Recovery
4. Eliminate Secondary DataCenters
5. Integrate with existing BCDR strategies

Replication is the key in any Disaster Recovery plan and ASR does this in a very sophisticated way

What can I replicate ?

1. On-Premises Physical Servers (Both  Hyper-V and VMWare)
2. On-Premises VMWare Virtual Machines
3. On-Premises Hyper-V Virtual Machines
4. On-Premises Hyper-V Hosts in VMM Cloud

Note : We can configure only the orchestration between On-premises Linux, On-Premise Hyper-V Hosts in VMM Cloud with SAN-Storage replication.

Now, I am going to show you the configuration of Azure Site Recovery between Hyper-V Virtual Machines and Azure Cloud

Prerequisites for Azure :

1. Azure Account
2. Azure Storage Account
3. Azure Site Recovery Vault
4. Azure Virtual Network

Prerequisites for Hyper-V

1. Server running with Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V role installed
2. At least 2 Virtual Machines running with this Hyper-V
3. Hyper-V host connected to internet

Note : If Hyper-V host cannot face internet, configure the proxy server which will allow the below url’s

• *.hypervrecoverymanager.windowsazure.com
• *.accesscontrol.windows.net
• *.backup.windowsazure.com
• *.blob.core.windows.net
• *.store.core.windows.net

Step :1

Create Azure Vault

Sign into https://manage.windows azure.com with azure account

1. Expand Dataservices -> Recovery Services and click Site recovery Vault
2. Click create new -> Quick Create and give the details of region and subscription
3. Click Create Vault

Step-2:

Create Hyper-V Site

Click on the Newly created Vault and select the highlighted pane

Select the recovery model as said below

1. Create Hyper-V Site 

click on “Create Hyper-V Site”

2. Prepare Hyper-V Server  ( These steps are to be performed in Hyper-V Host )

A sample Virtual Machine, VM1 is created in Hyper-V host for this demo

Download the Provider and  registration key to Hyper-V Host

Browse the Vault credentials which were downloaded

Come back to Azure Portal ( https://manage.windowsazure.com)

Create a Storage account 

Create Azure Network Account

Go back to the Azure Vault and create a Protection Group 

Select the Protection Group and add Virtual Machines to the Protection Group

Once we add the Virtual Machine, it is replicated to Azure 

Select the Virtual Machine and click on ” Test Failover”

Select the VM and review the configuration settings and change the Microsoft Azure Network to the network which we created

Select the Virtual Network for the failover

VM Replication Status

Disk Replication Status