Showing posts with label DR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DR. Show all posts
Using Azure Site Recovery with Managed Disks
Today I will be elaborating on that article slightly to explain a new feature that was announced last week around being able to protect Azure VM's using managed disks.
What are managed disks?
Managed disks are basically VM level disks that are managed and controlled by Azure. What this means is that when you are creating a new VM you are given an option of using an existing storage account and creating a normal disk in this location or the option of selecting a managed disk. A managed disk simplifies overall storage management and is also more reliable as its managed by Azure and will have better high availability during planned or unplanned maintenance. This can really help with making your life easier!
What is Azure Site Recovery?
As mentioned in the previous article Azure Site Recovery is used to be able to provide a business continuity disaster recovery (BC/DR) service for your IaaS VM's in Azure or on premises. ASR can also be used to migrate your on premises VM's into Azure. For further information on configuring this to protect an indivudual VM's please view the full article here: http://www.ruckcloud.ml/2018/02/using-azure-site-recovery-to-replicate.html
The new feature announced is implemented within the disaster recovery (preview) section and relates to your selections for setting up protection. You now have the option to select managed disks for replication. What this means is that you can select the manage disks that you would like to migrate to the secondary region, thus creating a fail-over copy. This also means that you will not need to select a storage account to migrate unless you still have VM's that may be located in them. Below is an image from Microsoft depicting this:
As you can see from this image, you now have the following options:
Source Managed Disk - Your original primary location VM managed disk
Replica Managed Disk - Your new replica managed disk location for protection
Replica Managed Disk Type - The type of managed disk that was initially selected
So in order to sum up this service, the advantage that this gives us is that any VM's with managed disks can easily be replicated to a secondary region through the Azure Site Recovery (preview) service without the need of managing multiple storage accounts within the target location in order to manage all of your replicated virtual machines.
Please read the official Microsoft blog post on the subject for further detailed information:
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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