Using Azure Site Recovery to replicate a VM





Today I will be writing about Microsoft Azure's Azure Site Recovery (ASR) service. This is really an incredible service that makes running your own DR replicated "secondary site" easy and cost effective.

The Microsoft Azure ASR service is a cloud based business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) service. It can be used for a whole bunch of different scenarios, as in copying on premises virtual machines (VM's) into Azure within a hybrid cloud model which can then be used in a full scale DR replication situation, permanently migrating on premises Hyper-V and VMware VM's into Azure and also for protecting current Azure VM's by replicating them to other regions. These options could also be used together depending on your architecture and individual requirements. Please view the official Microsoft Documentation for in depth required information.

In today's blog post I will be writing about the option of simply protecting your current VM's running in Azure as this is a good way to initially start using and learning the service. Please note that there are also various options for setting this up for a large number of VM's, but the below guide is just for a single VM running within Azure. For any further information the Azure documentation linked at the bottom of this article a great place to start!
As of writing this feature is still listed as under preview within the Azure portal.

1. Login in to the Azure portal:




2. Select an existing VM and then click on the "Disaster recovery (preview)" tab:




3. Next you will need to specify the region that you would like to replicate to, as well as some further information, as in your existing resource group, availability sets and virtual network. Some of these settings will auto populate depending on the location of the current region of the selected VM, as in this case "West Europe":





4. The next information required is related to storage, you will need to check or adjust the initial storage location (if not managed disks which aren't being referenced in this article - this particular VM is using an existing storage location), as well as setup a new or existing recovery services vault which will be used for the replication. A recovery services vault is a storage "backup" location in which your VM will be copied and stored. You can also select a new or existing resource group as well as replication policy. If you leave these as defaults new resources will be automatically created for you:




5. Once you have completed the above steps you will see a graphic displaying the available replication regions:



6. if all looks good click "Enable replication" and that's it, replication will begin! :)




Once completed you can check the replication status within the same "Disaster Recovery (preview tab)" above.
You are also able to delete the replication and adjust other settings if required.
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/azure-to-azure-quickstart
























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