In today’s IT environment, workloads are distributed across multiple locations – from on premises to the cloud. Each location has its own unique challenges, but one common denominator is the need for disaster recovery planning. Implementing the right DRaaS solution is non-negotiable to ensure application availability. azure site recovery step by step is a great option for administrators looking to implement a comprehensive DR solution for their on-premises and cloud-based workloads.
Azure Site Recovery is a cloud-based disaster recovery service that replicates on-premises virtual machines and applications to the cloud. It is part of the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and integrates with a wide range of services including Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, Azure Networking, Azure Security Center, and more. It also supports a number of industry-leading third-party backup and disaster recovery solutions.
Once configured, Azure Site Recovery can automate machine replication and failover operations. It can even manage the entire recovery of your on-premises environment in a failover scenario, ensuring that the correct machines are recoverable and running after a disaster. In addition, it provides a number of advanced features such as application-consistent recovery, which allows you to recover multiple VMs that make up an application to the same point in time.
To get started, you need to create a Recovery Services vault and add a source subscription, source resource group, and a target resource group. Then, select the VMs you want to protect and configure the replication settings. For this tutorial, we are using an on-premises VM as the config server and an Azure Resource Manager deployment model. Finally, select the target region where you want to replicate your VMs.
After configuring a recovery plan, you can perform a test failover to verify that your configuration is working correctly. This can be done either through a recovery plan (to orchestrate the failover of multiple VMs) or manually for each machine. A test failover will not affect your production environment, but it is important to perform regularly to test your disaster recovery plan.
During the test failover, you can verify that the VMs are ready to be restored and that all settings are configured correctly. You can also test the network switchover from the on-premises network to the Azure network. Once you have successfully tested your failover and recovery, you can then deploy the recovered VMs on-premises or to Azure.
To monitor your Site Recovery environment, you can use the built-in monitoring and reporting capabilities. These tools can help you detect potential issues before they become critical and track the health of your recovery environment. Additionally, Azure Site Recovery can send logs and telemetry to other Microsoft services such as Azure Monitor and Azure Automation and Policy to enable you to automatically execute recovery workflows. This enables you to reduce the effort it takes to manage your disaster recovery environment. Lastly, Azure Site Recovery continuously updates its capabilities to meet the highest industry standards for securing data in transit and at rest, meeting regulatory compliance requirements, and enforcing security best practices.