On June 4th 2018, Corey Sanders announced the general availability of Disaster Recovery (DR) for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) using Azure Site Recovery (ASR) in his blog post about why you should bet on Azure for your infrastructure needs today and in the future. Azure is the first public cloud to offer native Disaster Recovery solution for applications running on IaaS. With this offering, you can make your applications resilient to even region level failures by replicating VMs into another region. Along with Availability Sets and Availability Zones, Azure Site Recovery completes the resiliency continuum for applications running on Azure Virtual Machines.
Key benefits
- No infrastructure required: You do not need any additional software infrastructure (VMs or appliances) in your Azure subscription to enable this functionality. You avoid all the complexity and cost associated with deploying, monitoring, patching and maintaining any DR infrastructure.
“By using 'Azure to Azure DR', Microsoft’s Universal Store Team (UST), who develops and operates Microsoft’s core commerce Store and systems, was able to use its previously DR validated platform on-premises to perform the equivalent on Azure. Without ASR, the Universal Store team would have spent substantial resources deploying a new instance of the legacy platform in a DR site and spent more time validating DR.”
– Kingston Hui, Principal Service Engineering Manager, Microsoft Universal Store
- User flexibility to select DR region: You can replicate and protect IaaS based applications running on Azure to a different Azure region of your choice within a geographical cluster.
- Best-in-class RPO and RTO: Azure Site Recovery is backed by a 99.9 percent SLA and 24/7 support to keep your enterprise running smoothly. With best-in-class recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO), you can feel confident that your Azure applications will be available and compliant.
“ASR has helped Finastra refine our DR posture through intuitive configuration of replication between Azure regions. It’s currently our standard platform for disaster recovery and handling thousands of systems with no issues regarding scale or adherence to our tight RPO/RTO requirements.”
– Bryan Heymann, Director, Systems & Architecture, D+H
- Simplified experience with automatic DR resource creation: Enabling cross-region DR for an application is so simple that all you need to do is select the VMs you want to protect, choose a target Azure region, review replication settings and you are good to go. The required target resources such as virtual network and storage are automatically created by ASR.
- Non-disruptive DR drills: With ASR’s test failover capability, you can easily perform a DR drill anytime without any impact to the primary production application or to ongoing replication, giving you the confidence that your DR solution will work when you need it.
“Azure Site Recovery efficiently provides DR protection to our Azure global infrastructure. With 'Azure to Azure DR', we can accommodate application criticality and data movement requirements of each application environment independently. ASR offers a powerful approach to a complex issue. It works well with our hybrid network model and we can perform DR drills in a simple way.”
– Roberto Corradini, Global CTO of Luxottica
- Orchestrated application recovery: ASR's powerful Recovery Plans allows you to orchestrate the recovery of your entire application so that you can meet the strict recovery time requirements that your business demands.
- Comprehensive monitoring and troubleshooting: ASR’s advanced monitoring capabilities such as the vault dashboard and email notifications let you easily monitor DR health and failover readiness, and troubleshoot any issues quickly.
- Comprehensive OS coverage: ASR supports both Windows and Linux operating systems. ASR’s monthly release cadence ensures the latest Linux OS versions are supported.
- In-built compression to reduce network egress: ASR continually replicates data from source region to target region. The in-built compression technology reduces the network egress data by about 40 to 80 percent.
- Support for latest Azure features: As a fully integrated offering, ASR is updated with new Azure features as they’re released. ASR supports all Azure features such as classic and resource manager virtual machines, managed and unmanaged disks and large disks.
- Automatic updates: Azure Site Recovery has a monthly release cadence where enhancements to existing features or new ones are added and known issues, if any, are fixed. You can configure automatic updates to be always on the latest version and also avoid overhead of managing deployment of patches.
Disaster Recovery between Azure regions is available in all Azure regions where ASR is available. Get started with Azure Site Recovery today.
Related links and additional content
- Get started by configuring disaster recovery for Azure VMs.
- Learn more about the supported configurations for replicating Azure VMs.
- Need help? Reach out to Azure Site Recovery forum for support.
- Tell us how we can improve Azure Site Recovery by contributing new ideas and voting up existing ones.