Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a powerful disaster recovery solution that ensures the safety and availability of your virtual machines (VMs) by replicating workloads from your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. If your business relies on critical workloads hosted in an Azure Local environment, leveraging Azure Site Recovery can help safeguard your operations and minimize downtime in the event of an unexpected disaster.
Here, we provide a step-by-step guide to using Azure Site Recovery with Azure Local to protect your Windows and Linux VM workloads.
What is Azure Site Recovery?
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Azure Site Recovery is a service within Microsoft Azure that allows businesses to replicate and recover workloads running on VMs during a disaster. By continuously replicating your VMs to Azure, Site Recovery ensures your infrastructure is protected and recoverable.
For a seamless disaster recovery plan, Azure Site Recovery integrates directly with Azure Local, enabling you to manage VM replication, failover, and recovery from within the Azure portal. This integration provides a unified disaster recovery solution that protects your business-critical workloads, both on-premises and in the cloud.
Key benefits of Azure Site Recovery on Azure Local
Using Azure Site Recovery in combination with Azure Local offers several key advantages:
- Seamless Failover and Failback: Azure Site Recovery allows you to failover your VMs to Azure and continue operations, with the option to failback to the on-premises infrastructure once the disaster is resolved.
- Comprehensive Protection: It protects your VMs from disasters by replicating workloads to Azure, ensuring business continuity.
- Automated Recovery: You can automate disaster recovery steps, reducing the complexity of manual intervention and improving your recovery times.
- Simple Setup and Management: Managing disaster recovery is simplified with tools like the Azure Portal and Recovery Services Vault, ensuring easy configuration and monitoring.
How to protect your Azure Local VMs with site recovery
1. Start with a Registered Azure Local Instance: To enable Azure Site Recovery, begin by registering your Azure Local environment in the Azure portal.
2. Set Up Recovery Services Vault: Create a Recovery Services Vault in the Azure portal. This vault will store your configuration and recovery data.
3. Prepare Your Infrastructure: Set up the necessary infrastructure, including your Hyper-V site and replication policies.
4. Enable VM Replication: Once your infrastructure is ready, enable VM replication through the Azure Site Recovery resource in the portal.
5. Test Failover: After replication is complete, perform a Test Failover to validate that the failover process works as expected without impacting your live environment.
6. Create Recovery Plans: With Azure Site Recovery, you can also create Recovery Plans that allow you to manage the failover process for entire applications. Recovery Plans enable you to sequence the recovery steps for multiple VMs and automate the recovery process.
7. Failover and Run in Azure: When a disaster strikes, failover your replicated VMs to Azure, ensuring your workloads continue running without disruption.
Considerations before using Azure Site Recovery
Before implementing Azure Site Recovery, there are a few important caveats to keep in mind:
- Arc Extensions: Extensions installed by Azure Arc on your VMs are not visible on the Azure VMs after failover. You can still manage these extensions but they won’t be active until the VM is migrated back to the on-premises system.
- Guest Configuration Policies: Any guest configuration policies, such as those auditing OS security settings, will not function while the VM is running in Azure. These policies will resume once the machine is back on-premises.
- Log Data: Log data such as Sentinel, Defender, and Azure Monitor information will be associated with the Azure VM during the failover. However, once the VM is migrated back to the on-premises environment, logs will be linked with the Arc server instead.
- Azure VM Guest Agent: It is recommended to avoid installing the Azure VM Guest Agent to prevent conflicts with Azure Arc extensions. If necessary, ensure extension management is disabled before installing the agent.
Why Choose AVASOFT for Azure Site recovery solutions?
At AVASOFT, we specialize in providing expert guidance and solutions for Microsoft 365 and Azure environments. With our deep understanding of Azure Site Recovery, we ensure that your Azure Local VM workloads are fully protected from disasters, giving you peace of mind knowing your business-critical data is safeguarded.
Our team can assist in the smooth implementation of Azure Site Recovery, from configuration to failover testing, ensuring that your disaster recovery strategy is comprehensive and effective. By leveraging our expertise, you can confidently protect your infrastructure and minimize downtime in the event of a disaster.
Whether you are new to Azure Site Recovery or need assistance optimizing your existing disaster recovery processes, AVASOFT is your trusted partner in ensuring business continuity.
