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Replicate On-Premises Hyper-V VMs to Azure Using Azure Site Recovery and Virtual Machine Manager



Recovery point retention: It is used to hold the copy of the virtual machine in time with retention that is how long (in hours), the retention window can be kept for each recovery point of a virtual machine. The replicated virtual machines can be recovered to any point in this 24-hour window, and 24-hour retention is supported for machines replicated to premium storage.




Configure Azure Site Recovery With Virtual Machine Manager




Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a DRaaS offered by Azure for use in cloud and hybrid cloud architectures. A near-constant data replication process makes sure copies are in sync. The application consistent snapshot feature of Azure Site Recovery ensures that the data is in usable state after the failover. The service enables customers to use Azure as a disaster recovery site on a pay-as-you-go model without having to invest in additional infrastructure.


RPO and RTO targets: ASR supports replication frequencies as low as 30 seconds and can be tailored to meet organization specific RPO and RTO targets. By integrating automation runbooks with your recovery plans as well as integration with Traffic manager, the RTO can be further reduced. Recovery plans are highly customizable to allow quick and sequenced failover and recovery of multi-tiered apps such databases and web services.


Site Recovery Manager, in combination with Azure VMware Solution, enhances disaster recovery by allowing organizations to replicate their virtual machines, create dynamic recovery plans, and non-disruptively test them to drive recovery readiness. Let's take a look at more of the details of what makes Site Recovery Manager a robust solution to meet the most stringent DR needs.


Replication is a crucial component of disaster recovery, and Site Recovery Manager supports the flexibility of using vSphere Replication to move VM data from the source to the target site. vSphere Replication provides per-VM level replication to and from any storage supported by vSphere. vSphere Replication supports traffic encryption and compression, OS quiescing, and multiple point-in-time snapshots, which can significantly help with ransomware attacks. Additionally, Site Recovery Manager supports the flexibility of interoperating with various versions of vCenter, enhancing the ease of use.


Site Recovery Manager can be configured and deployed in a few hours easily. Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication, which are both deployed as virtual appliances, are installed at the source and target sites to ensure that neither site has dependencies on the other in a disaster. Site Recovery Manager requires a vCenter server at both locations for the same reason.


Recovery site resources can be expensive. Site Recovery Manager when combined with the dynamic, on-demand scalability of Azure VMware Solution provides the ideal mixture of cost and recovery time. The recovery site resources can be kept at a minimal level until needed, and then expanded as part of the recovery process.


The default setting of the runbook is configured to run daily at 12:00 AM as per the time zone of the replicated virtual machine. Users can modify the runbook schedule via the automation account. Further configuration options are available at the documentation page.


Users who enable replication for a VM by either starting from the virtual machine view, or from the recovery services vault, get an option to choose to either allow Site Recovery to manage updates for the Site Recovery or to manually manage them.


Azure Site Recovery contributes to an organization's business continuity and disaster recovery strategy by replicating workloads to the secondary region. Microsoft announced Azure Site Recovery support for Zone to Zone disaster recovery in May 2020, which is currently available in limited with two regions: Southeast Asia and UK South (at the time of writing this article). This feature enables, replicate, failover, and failback Azure virtual machines from one Availability Zone to another within the same Azure region. This benefits organizations by managing disaster recovery solutions in a much simpler way and with minimal cost. Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region. Each Availability Zone is made up of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking.


7. Configure replication settingsAvailability zones: 3 (Azure provides zones other than source VM is provisioned).8. Click customize to change target settings and click OK to save.Target resource group: Azure-dr-demoTarget virtual network: demo-test-vnet01Azure creates a storage account for replicating Virtual machine disks to the target site. Azure defaults create it, or you can specify your storage account. This will be in a source resource group.If you want to change disk SKU to premium or standard for target VM can be performed on this page.


Test Failover virtual machine to the secondary zone:In this section, we will be performing a test failover procedure.1. From the Azure portal, select source virtual machine and click disaster recovery under operations. The same step can be performed from the vault, replicated items.2. Click test failover and select recovery points from options and test virtual networks.


Things to note: - Zone to zone Disaster recovery supported only in UK south and South East Asia.- Recovery plans for Zone to Zone disaster recovery via the portal are not supported and use PowerShell and REST API.- Occasionally virtual machines behind a public load balancer, will show config error and it would not stop virtual machine replication.- If workloads require Azure load balancer, then ensure you have a zone redundant load balancer is created. You can proceed with the same procedure for replication. After failover, add the new target virtual machine into a load balancer backend pool.- For machines running the Site Recovery extension version 9.28.x.x onwards Update rollup 40 Site Recovery cleans up machines in the secondary disaster recovery region after failback is complete and VMs are re-protected. There is no need to manually delete VMs and NICs in the secondary region. If you completely disable replication after failing back, Site Recovery cleans up the disks in the disaster recovery region, in addition to the VMs and NICs.


Customers running workloads on other clouds, like Azure or GCP, can increase resilience and meet compliance requirements by using AWS as their disaster recovery site. CloudEndure Disaster Recovery provides an easy cross-cloud solution for replicating and recovering workloads from other cloud providers to AWS. It automatically converts your source machines so that they boot and run natively on AWS.


Next step is to set your disaster recovery source and target. Source can be AWS Region, if you want to perform a Region to Region disaster recovery within AWS. The source is Other Infrastructure, if your source environment is a physical datacenter, virtual environment or any other public cloud.


Can HA include DR? Yes. For enterprise mission-critical IT services, this concept is common. Take for instance the second example in the HA description above, coupled with appropriate recovery of other non-Citrix components related to the solution, would be regarded as a highly available DR solution wherein a service (Citrix) fails over to an opposing data center. That particular architecture can be implemented as Active-Passive or Active-Active in various multi-site iterations such as Active-Passive for all users, Active-Active with users preferring one data center over another, or Active-Active with users being load balanced between two data centers without preference. It is important to note that when designing such solutions, standby capacity must be considered, accounted for, and load monitored on an ongoing basis to ensure capacity remains available to accommodate DR, if it is required.


Now known as Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, the tool still enables Hyper-V users to automate backup of virtual machines and organises failover to a disaster recovery site. The important change is that Azure can now be used as the disaster recovery site, meaning that it is no longer necessary for Hyper-V users to operate their own secondary data centre.


Microsoft is promising automated replication of virtual machines between on-premises data centres and Azure, with encryption applied to data as it traverses networks into Microsoft's bit barns (and once it lands, if desired). Integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager is provided, so there's no need for extra control freakery. Restoration of services can also be automated, with PowerShell, while it is possible to create virtual networks that span your data centre and Azure.


Azure Site Recovery is a product in the Azure family to help ensure one can attain his business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy. Site Recovery works by replicating your disks to another region. When you register your virtual machine in ASR, it installs a utility called Site Mobility that monitors the writes in the VM and transfers them into a cache storage account located in the same region as the VM its protecting. ASR then monitors that cache storage account and transfers that data to a (managed) disk or a target storage account. After the data is processed, crash-consistent recovery points are generated every five minutes. App-consistent recovery points are generated according to the setting specified in the replication policy (minimum is every hour).


When you initiate a failover, the VMs along with the NICs are created in the target resource group, then added to the target availability zone / target availability set, associated to target virtual network, and target subnet. During a failover, you can use any recovery point1.


A network mapping maps virtual networks in the primary region to virtual networks in the recovery region. The network mapping specifies the Azure virtual network in the recovery region, that a virtual machine in the primary virtual network should fail over to. One Azure virtual network can be mapped to only a single Azure virtual network in a recovery region. 2ff7e9595c


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