Disaster Recovery of a VM in Azure

Background

Back in June 2018, Microsoft announced the general availability of Disaster Recovery (DR) for Azure virtual machines using Azure Site Recovery. Azure is the first public cloud provider to offer native DR solution for application running on IaaS.

Along with Availability Zone and availability sets, ‘Azure Site Recovery’ provides resiliency for applications running on Azure VMs.

This blog will cover the extensive points on disaster recovery setup process for virtual machine hosted in Azure.

I’ve divided this article into several sub-sections for disaster recovery:

Prerequisites
Create Recovery Services Vault
Enable Replication
Test Failover
Failover, Commit & Re-Protect

Prerequisites:

Azure subscription with permission to create ‘Recovery Services Vault’ and VMs in target region along with virtual network, storage account etc.
Supported VM operating systems like Windows or Linux.
Supported Azure regions for disaster recovery (DR)
Outbound network connectivity for VM replication and latest root certificates

Create Recovery Services Vault:

Create a Recovery Services vault in any region, except the source region to replicate. For this article, I’ll consider source as ‘East Asia’ region and will replicate VMs in target ‘Southeast Asia’ region.

1. Login to Azure portal and search & select ‘Recovery Services Vault’

2. Fill out the details like ‘Resource Group’, ‘Vault Name’ and ‘Region’, then click Next

3. Add ‘Tags’ (optional) in next page, then click Next

4. Verify the details and click ‘Create’

5. Follow the progress under Notifications and move on to next section

Enable Replication

1. Open Vault and go to settings, click Enable Site Recovery

2. In Site recovery page, click on enable VM replication by selecting ‘Enable replication’

3. This will bring a new page called ‘Source’ to fill up the details of source VM and click ‘Next’

a. Source Location – East Asia (as stated earlier)

b. Azure Virtual machine deployment model – leave that as default Resource Manager

c. Source Subscription – [Your Subscription Name]

d. Source resource group – [Your Resource Group]

e. Disaster Recovery between Availability Zones – leave it as ‘No’

4. Select VM Name in next page called ‘Virtual Machines’ and click ‘Next’

5. At the ‘Replication settings’ page, verify the details and click ‘Enable Replication’

6. Follow the progress under Notifications and move on to next section

7. Once VM Replication is complete, then replication status can be seen under ‘Replicated Items’ section

Test Failover:

Before running test failover, check if VM is protected and healthy. Make sure, you select an Azure virtual network in target region when you run a test failover. Azure VM created after the failover will be placed in this network.

1. Click on the VM which opens a page that looks something similar to below one. On the Overview page, you get various option like Failover, Test failover, Disable replication etc.

2. Click on Test Failover and choose a recovery point. In Azure Virtual network, select target network in which to place Azure VM created after the failover and click OK to start the failover.

3. Follow the progress under Notifications and move on to next section

4. After the failover completes, Azure VM created in Target region. Make sure that VM is running, sized appropriately and connected to the network selected.

5. Upon the completion of test failover, clean up the resources using ‘Cleanup Test Failover’ button as shown in above screenshot

6. Follow the progress under Notifications and move on to next section

Failover, Commit & Re-protect:

1. Upon the completion of Test failover and cleanup, select ‘Failover’ on the overview page.

2. Choose a ‘recovery point’ and click on the checkbox ‘Shut Down machine before beginning failover’ and select OK to start the failover.

3. Follow the progress under Notifications and move on to next section

Failover completed status is displayed on below screen.

4. Upon failover, VM is created in target region appears in Virtual machines.

Commit

Please note, if you would like to delete all the available recovery points of the VM in Site recovery, use Commit option as shown in below screenshot.

If you commit, you won’t be able to change the recovery point.

5. Click on Commit to delete all recovery points