Disaster Recovery For Azure Applications - Failover, Test Failover

Introduction

We will set up an Azure Site Recovery simply, by replicating an Azure VM to a different Azure region directly from the Azure portal. As a fully integrated offering, Site Recovery is automatically updated with new Azure features as they’re released. We can minimize recovery issues by sequencing the order of multi-tier applications running on multiple virtual machines. We will ensure compliance by testing the disaster recovery plan without impacting production workloads or end users. And we can keep applications available during outages with automatic recovery from on-premises to Azure or Azure to another Azure region.

Source

Types of DR

1. Active to Standby – Non-Read / Write encrypted file will be created
2. Active to Active –To Run the VM’s in both Side (Source and Target)
3. Active to Geo Cluster – To Run the VM’s in both Sides Across the globe

Note
Source and Target should be in a different Resource Group

Popular Backup Tools

1. Acronyms
2. Commvault

Migration Tool

1. zerto

In this article, production VM’s are running in South India, so if you want to create a Disaster Recovery site, then it could not be created within the same region/resource group.

Step 1

Login into the Azure portal here, then create a Virtual Machine and then two resource groups in different regions. If you are not familiar with VM Creation Azure portal, refer to my previous article, create-a-virtual-network-virtual-machine-by-using-the-azure-portal.

 

Step 2

Go to Azure Market Place and select  Storage and Backup Site Recovery (OMS)

 

Step 3

Create a new Recovery Services vault (RSV). In this article, the Southeast Asia region will be our disaster recovery location. Here, I have selected DisasterRecovery resource group, click on the Create button.

 

Step 4

1. Go to All resources, select the RSV which was created earlier in this article, click on the Replicate button
2. The source will be an Azure model
3. Select Source region/location. In this article, we have selected South India
4. Choose the deployment model. In this article, we have selected the Resource Manager
5. Healthcare resource group is our primary site so we have selected the same.
6. The System will be populated by the Virtual Machines which are available in the selected resource group (Healthcare), here we can select either single or multiple VMs
   
   Note
   Only running VMs can be selected for replication.
   
   
7. By default, Site Recovery will mirror the source site configuration to the target site by creating/using the required resource groups, storage accounts, virtual network, managed disks, and availability sets. You can change the settings below.
8. By default, Replication Point retention would be 24 hours, which means VM replicated image would be available only for the last 24 hours
9. Snapshot frequency is used for configuring sync time between source and target
10. Click on the Customize button to change the default values of replication
11. Click on the target resource button, after that the system will run the validation to enable replication button and then click on the same.
12. Site Recovery jobs will run to create the VM clone in DR site region, in general, a minimum of 30 -45 minutes.
    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 5

1. Click on the Virtual Machine button to view the newly configured VM’s of the DR site. All the names would be appended with asr.
2. Go to All resources, select the Replicate Items button, the system will populate list Primary VMs, Click on the VM to check the Failover or Test Failover.
3. Choose Recovery point and Azure Virtual Network to start the Test Failover process.
   
   
   
   

Summary

In this article, we have learned about how to set up Disaster Recovery and Failover, and Test Failover sites.