On-Premises Disaster Recovery Set Up In Azure Cloud Using Azure Site Recovery

Introduction

ASR is a tool provided by Microsoft to handle replication and disaster recovery. In ASR, we have two types - failover and failover test.

In case of a disaster in the on-premises environment, Azure admins can start the failover recovery plan. The plan helps in recovering the virtual machines and their virtual networks from on-premises to the Azure cloud so that the business is not impacted during the disaster.

As per the current scenario, Azure ASR does not protect Generation 2 VMs during the failover. Rather, it converts the Generation 2 VMs into Generation 1 VMs.

In this article, we will learn how to set up disaster recovery of an on-premise VM to Azure cloud and below are the types,

Replication
Failover
Failback

Prerequisites

Before starting this article, we should know how to Install Azure Site Recovery (ASR) Service in On-Premises server.

Step 1 - Prepare Infrastructure

In the previous article, we created a Recovery Service Vault. This means we have finished the steps of Protected Global Deployment Planning and now the setup of infrastructure is to be done.
Once the registration of ASR is done on the On-premises servers, the same will be reflected on the "Prepare Source" section on the Azure portal. Select "Configuration Server" and click OK.
Target – We need to Create New/Use Existing Storage Account to keep the non-readable and non-writeable encrypted migrated file. There are three different replication types available in Azure.

Locally-redundant Storage (LRS)
Geo-redundant Storage (GRS)
Read-access geo-redundant Storage (RA-GRS)

Create a new virtual network or use an existing one for the replication.

Replication Settings

Create and associate the replication policy by following the below steps.

In this article, let’s set the source type as a physical machine and target type as Azure.
Then, set the parameters - Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - which are related to time measurement or intervals, typically defined in hours.
1. RPO defines the data that will be lost in case of disaster.
2. RTO defines the time limit to restore the data. If RTO is set to 2 hours, then the business needs to ensure that their system downtime should not exceed 2 hours.
3. If RTO and RPO are set to zero, the business is running a mission-critical application and the maintenance cost will be very high.
Click OK in order to complete the "Prepare Infrastructure" steps.

Step 2 - Enable Replication

We have two types of source available in Azure - Azure and On-premises
Source location would be our newly created On-premise VM on AWS Server.
Machine type is Physical.
Process server should be same as Source location server.
Then, set up the target. Here, Azure is the target.
You can track the progress of the "Enable Protection" Job in Settings > Jobs > Site Recovery Jobs. After the finalized Protection job runs, the machine is ready for failover.
It can take 15 minutes or longer for changes to take effect and appear on the portal.
Finally, to monitor the VMs, you can add the last discovered time for VMs in Configuration Servers> Last Contact At. To add VMs without waiting for the scheduled discovery, highlight the configuration server (don't select it) and select Refresh.

Summary

In this article, we have learned about the installation and set up of Azure Site Recovery on On-Premise Server and Azure Cloud.