Azure Site Recovery

In this chapter, Azure Site Recovery (ASR) will be introduced as a business continuity solution. We'll look at why it should be used and which environments it supports. Then, the prerequisites for preparing an environment will be covered, followed by how to enable replication and create recovery plans. After that, you will learn how to check whether ASR is functioning properly or not. Finally, links to more information about ASR will be provided for you to gain more knowledge about it.

The following topics will be covered:

• Introduction to ASR
• ASR supportability
• Preparing your environment for ASR
• Kicking off replication from on-premises to ASR
• ASR recovery plans
• Testing ASR
• Further information

Introduction to ASR

Business continuity is one of the most important key points, especially for enterprises. Building a disaster recovery site is a must-do step to take in order to have an optimal environment. That is why Microsoft Azure provides ASR services, which can be used to build your disaster recovery site.

This service helps to ensure that your applications are up and running all the time, even if a disaster happens to your data center.

When using ASR, you can build your own disaster recovery site for your Azure VMs, your on-premises VMs and/or physical servers, or even manage replication between a primary and secondary site.

In March 2015, Microsoft announced the launch of ASR and, since then, this service has undergone many enhancements and added features according to the customers' feedback.

ASR supportability

At the time of writing, ASR supports replication from the following sources:

• Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 and 2016
• vSphere 5.5, 6.0, and 6.5
• Physical servers

Hyper-V servers

As mentioned earlier, you can only replicate Hyper-V VMs from Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016. However, if you are managing your Hyper-V hosts with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), you can use it to replicate VMs from Hyper-V hosts.

At the time of writing, SCVMM 2012 R2 and 2016 are the supported versions to work with ASR.

You need to install the latest updates for your Hyper-V hosts and SCVMM to avoid any issues during replication. Also, you need to make sure that your SCVMM 2016 cloud does not support the...

Preparing your environment for ASR

Before starting the replication between your on-premises and Azure, the environment needs to be prepared by building a site-to-site VPN connection, then installing and registering the ASR provider.

Building a site-to-site VPN connection

In this topic, we will go through the process of building a site-to-site VPN connection, considering Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) as the local VPN.

You can have your local VPN device, such as Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, and so on. You can check the supported VPN devices list at the following link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/vpn-gateway/vpn-gateway-about-vpn-devices.

Without further ado, let's get started with the steps:

1. Create...

Kicking off replication from on-premises to ASR

By now, we are good to go ahead and start our replication by following these steps:

1. Since we are done with preparing the infrastructure, we can go ahead to step 1 of Azure replication, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 7.25: Step 1 of Azure replication

2. Then, you have to specify the source and its location, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 7.26: Specify the replication source

3. After that, you have to specify some settings for the target, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 7.27: Specify the target settings

4. Now, you can specify which VMs you want to be replicated to ASR, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 7.28: Select the VMs you want to be replicated

5. Once the VM is selected, you have to specify the OS type, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 7.29: The VM properties

...

ASR recovery plans

It is not common to have ASR without a recovery plan, especially for large environments where you have domain controllers, web servers, SQL Servers, SharePoint Servers, Exchange Servers, and so on.

If there is no recovery plan when failover of the servers to Azure takes place, they will start randomly, and that will affect many machines. For example, if the SharePoint Server starts first without the domain controller and SQL Server up and running, that will cause issues. Therefore, you need to make a recovery plan to specify the dependencies of the machines.

The recovery plan would do the following:

• Specify the machines that would failover together and failback together
• Specify the dependencies between machines so that machines with higher priorities, such as domain controllers, start first.

To create a recovery plan, you have to follow these steps:

1. Navigate...

Testing ASR

Before getting started with testing the failover, it is recommended to create a virtual network on which the failover VM will be located.

To test the failover, you have to follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Recovery Services vault, then go to Replicated items, select the VM you want to test the failover for, and then click on Test Failover.
2. You will be navigated to a new blade, where you have to specify which virtual network the VM will be located in.

3. Once you have clicked on OK, the failover process will start performing the following tasks:
   1. Prerequisites check for test failover.
   2. Creating a test environment.
   3. Creating a test virtual machine.
   4. Preparing the virtual machine.
   5. Starting the virtual machine.
   6. Complete testing: this task will require user interaction by clicking on Complete testing.
   7. Cleaning up the test virtual machine.
   8. Cleaning up the test environment...

Further information

For further information about ASR, you can check out the following links:

• Multi-tenant support in ASR for replicating VMware virtual machines to Azure through CSP: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/site-recovery-multi-tenant-support-vmware-using-csp
• Set up disaster recovery to Azure for on-premises physical servers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/tutorial-physical-to-azure
• Set up disaster recovery for Hyper-V VMs to your secondary on-premises site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/tutorial-vmm-to-vmm
• Set up disaster recovery of on-premises VMware virtual machines or physical servers to a secondary site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/tutorial-vmware-to-vmware
• Run a disaster recovery drill to Azure: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/tutorial-dr-drill-azure...

Summary

We are done with the second part of Azure Recovery Services. Throughout the chapter, we have proved the importance of ASR and how to work with it. Therefore, it is very important to check the links that I've provided in the Further information section to find out more about it and how to work with things that have not been mentioned in this chapter, such as VMware hosts, and physical servers.

Coming up in the next chapter, you will learn about another solution related to disaster recovery and business continuity, which is called StorSimple. You will also learn about some tools that work with Azure, such as AzCopy and Azure Storage Explorer.