I am excited to announce the preview of our integration of SQL AlwaysOn with Azure Site Recovery. At Azure Site Recovery we have been consistently working to provide guidance to setup disaster recovery for various workloads keeping in mind the unique availability requirements for each application. This time we went a step further. Azure Site Recovery now provides native support for SQL AlwaysOn.

SQL Availability Groups can now be added to ASR Recovery plans along with virtual machines. All capabilities of ASR Recovery plans such as sequencing, scripting and manual actions can be leveraged to orchestrate the failover of a multi-tier application that uses a SQL database, configured with AlwaysOn replication, as backend.

A typical three tier application consists of a database tier, an application tier and a web frontend tier. SQL AlwaysOn is the technology of choice for disaster recovery of a SQL Server. Virtual machines forming application tier and web frontend tier can be replicated to Azure using one of many ways supported by ASR.

With this release you get to use the best in class replication for each tier of the application in addition to the rich failover orchestration capabilities provided by ASR. This also takes away the need to write and manage the scripts required for failover of SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups. This solution is currently supported only for System Center Virtual Machine Manager managed environments.

For more information about how to set things up, check out the Azure Site Recovery documentation.

Getting started with Azure Site Recovery is easy – simply sign up for a free Microsoft Azure trial.

If you have any feedback or features you'd like to see in ASR, send them our way on the Azure Site Recovery Feedback Forum. Visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with other customers.