Cross Region Restore of Azure VMs now generally available
Published date: 17 February, 2021
Azure Backup stores backup data in Recovery service vault which defaults storage settings to geo-redundancy, and the backed up data in the primary region is geo-replicated to an Azure-paired secondary region. However, the data that is replicated to the secondary region is available to restore in the secondary region only if Azure declares a disaster in the primary region. Customers who opt in to this feature can initiate restores in the secondary region at any time. Hence, customer-controlled secondary region restores are made possible in both instances of the primary region being available or unavailable.
While we move the preview of CRR for Azure VMs to GA, CRR for SQL/SAP HANA databases running in Azure VMs will continue to be in preview.
What’s new
Azure zone pinned VMs are enabled with CRR vaults
Azure zonal pinned VMs that are backed up with RS vault enabled with this feature will now be provided with options to restore in any zone of the customer’s choice. This will help customers set up the same environment or even clone the Azure VMs in another zone. This will also allow customers to restore to any zones in cross-region or secondary region, if enabled with Cross Region Restore. Learn more
More options of Azure VMs supported
Azure Backup supports all managed and unmanaged VMs for Cross Region Restore. Classic VMs remain unsupported.
Secondary Region RPO
In this release, we are starting with replication RPO (recovery point objective) of up to 12 hours in the secondary region even though the storage SLA of geo replication is 15 mins.
GA pricing same as preview pricing
As this feature is critical to customers looking for BCDR (business continuity and disaster recovery), we are continuing to offer RA-GRS (read-access geo-redundant storage) replication pricing as same as preview pricing in GA as well. For more details, check our pricing page.