Azure site recovery is a cloud-based disaster recovery service that automatically replicates on-premises physical servers and virtual machines to a secondary location. This allows you to access applications from the secondary location and fail back to your primary data center if there is an outage at the primary site. ASR is a key component of the Azure platform and allows you to build and test your Disaster Recovery plans to ensure that you can minimize downtime.
The service provides a range of features that support a full disaster recovery solution, including replication, orchestration and failover. Its integration with other services such as Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Storage and Azure Networking provides a seamless recovery experience that is easy to manage and cost-effective. The service also enables you to create and test your disaster recovery plan by enabling you to run tests in an isolated environment without interrupting ongoing replication.
You can create an azure site recovery vault by selecting the New -> Recovery services vault option in the portal. In the New recovery services vault dialog box, enter a name for the vault and select Create. In the Vault resources tab, select a subscription in which to create a vault and the resource group in which to store protected VMs. You must also provide the Vault owner role or assign the built-in Contributor role to manage Site Recovery operations in a vault.
Once you have a vault created, you can begin to create a azure site recovery plan for your on-premises data center. To create a plan, you must have the Contributor role or the Contributor to the vault role. Then you can add one or more replication policies and select the type of VM to protect.
For VMware VMs, you can specify the disk that you want to replicate and the frequency of application-consistent snapshots. You can also configure an RPO threshold and specify the target region for replication. For physical machines, you can also select the type of hardware to replicate.
You must have a high-speed, redundant connection between the sites to replicate the data. You can use ExpressRoute for this connectivity, but you must connect to the public endpoint and not the private peering used by your production environments. You must also have outbound connectivity to specific URLs used by Configuration Server, which is required to orchestrate Site Recovery replication.
The Azure Site Recovery service supports a number of security best practices including encryption in transit and at rest. It provides the capability to protect multiple sites and support a variety of recovery scenarios for multi-tier applications that include application, network and database layers. It also offers the ability to test recovery plans without disrupting replication, allowing you to test your disaster recovery strategy and be confident that it can meet business continuity needs.