Application-Aware Availability Solutions with Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery enables customers to deploy application-aware availability on demand solutions. Be it Windows Server or Linux based applications, Microsoft first party enterprise applications or offerings from other vendors, you can use Azure Site Recovery to enable disaster recovery, deploy on-demand DevTest environments or migrate them to Azure. ASR replication technologies can protect the entire virtual machine with all their disks and data. This allows it to be compatible with any application running on the machine. Microsoft has deep expertise and experience in developing best in class enterprise applications such as SharePoint, Exchange, Dynamics, SQL Server. Over the last few months we have worked in close partnership with these application groups at Microsoft to enable you to deploy customized disaster recovery and availability solutions with ASR. Azure Site Recovery solutions have been tested and are now supported for SharePoint, Dynamics AX, Exchange 2013, Remote Desktop Services, SQL Server, IIS applications and System Center family like Operations Manager.  In addition to Microsoft applications, we have also done extensive testing for and support third party applications like SAP and applications running on different distributions of Linux. Azure Site Recovery features have been designed with application level protection/recovery in mind:

• Near-Sync replication with RPO as low as 30 seconds that meets the need of most critical applications.
• App consistent snapshots for single or N-tier applications
• Flexibility to choose & integrate with app level replication. Leverage best in class application level offerings like AD replication, SQL Always On, Exchange Database Availability Groups when applicable. Use ASR’s in-built replication for other tiers.
• Extensible Recovery Plans to model entire application and organize application-aware recovery/migration workflows. Trigger single click end to end application recovery when needed.
• Advanced network management in ASR and Azure. Automate all networking configurations specific to your application: reserve IP addresses, configure load balancers, or use traffic manager for achieving low RTO switch-over.
• Rich Automation Library that provide production-ready, application specific scripts. Download them and integrate into your ASR based solutions.

  If you are managing a SharePoint or Dynamics AX deployment, you can use ASR to eliminate the cost and overhead of maintaining a stand-by deployment for DR or DevTest. ASR can replicate the entire farm and bring it up on-demand for disaster recovery or for creating a production-like test copy. Any new application or configuration changes deployed on the primary farm will be automatically replicated within minutes so you do not have to invest in complex processes to keep the secondary farm up to date. SQL Servers are the foundation of many critical enterprise applications. With ASR, you can easily replicate and recover SQL Server to another site or to Azure. ASR can also integrate with best in class native disaster recovery solution such as SQL Always On Availability Groups and manage their failover operations as part of ASR Recovery Plans. For Exchange Servers,  DAG provides best in class disaster recovery solution and is the recommended deployment option. ASR Recovery Plans can be integrated with DAGs to orchestrate DAG failovers across sites via scripted actions. For small Exchange 2013 deployments, such as a single server or non-clustered servers, customers can use Azure Site Recovery to protect the servers to a secondary on-premises site. Windows Server’s Remote Desktop Services provides technologies that enable users to access session-based desktops, virtual machine-based desktops, or applications. With ASR you can deploy Disaster Recovery or cloud bursting solution for your RDS deployments and enable high-fidelity desktop experiences to be always available to your customers. We will take a deep-dive look at the these application specific solutions and supported configuration at the IGNITE conference. We recommend you checkout ASR related sessions at IGNITE this week. We will also share detailed technical guidance via our documentation sites in coming weeks to help you easily deploy these solutions into your environments.  This is an on-going journey and we will keep investing in covering more applications and lighting up richer application-aware experiences with Azure Site Recovery. Check out the recording from our Ignite session on best practices for deploying disaster recovery with ASR.