Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is Microsoft’s offerring for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). It reduces complexity and cost by replicating your virtual machines and physical servers to Azure or secondary location.

Site Recovery offers the following features:

• Quick deploy Site Recovery and manage replications, failover, and failback from a single location in the Azure portal.
• Replicate your Azure VMs to another region (Preview)
• Site recovery replication encrypts data in transit and you can encrypt at rest.
• Customize and sequence failover and recovery of multi-tier applications on multiple VMs with recovery plans
• Recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) within organization limits.
• Easily test failovers to support disaster recovery drills, without affecting ongoing replication or your production environment.
• Integrate with Azure Automation to enhance your recovery plans.

To get started it is important to review the capacity planning documentation, so you start on the right path. What does it capture? It gathers information about compatible and incompatible VMs, disks per VM, network bandwidth requirements, and the Azure infrastructure needed for successful replication and test failover.

Capacity Planner for Hyper-V Replication

Deployment Planner for VMware replication to Azure

Next articles, I will cover how to create a Recovery Vault, Configure a recovery plan and Integrate Azure Automation with ASR.