Read on:
Beginners’ Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: What is Hyper-V Integration Services – Part 48
Site-level replication helps to protect critical business applications from an entire site-level failure. In conjunction with Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Hyper-V has excellent services allowing you to replicate your essential Hyper-V virtual machines to Microsoft Azure for site-level resiliency. Using Azure Site Recovery, you can replicate, failover, and recover Hyper-V virtual machines between on-premises Hyper-V VMs and Microsoft Azure. Let’s look at Azure Site Recovery and see how this service allows effective VM replication to the cloud.
Why site-level replication is crucial
Many types of disasters can take down an entire physical site location. These include natural disasters, ransomware attacks, major physical infrastructure failures, etc. Today’s organizations must have a business continuity and disaster recovery plan to recover from such failures and keep business-critical data safe. Replicating data from one site to another is a great way to protect against site-level failure. It also helps businesses align with the 3-2-1 backup best practice methodology.
Most organizations are running virtual machines in their primary data center. Replicating those virtual machines to a secondary data center creates identical copies of the production VMs in the secondary data center, which the organization can fail over to in the event of a site-level failure.
The failover process redirects access to production apps and services to the secondary data center location. Once access is restored to the primary data center, you can fail back to the primary data center for access.
What is Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is a service you can integrate with your on-premises Hyper-V environment to bolster BCDR for apps and workloads. With Azure Site Recovery, you can replicate workloads on physical and virtual machines from a primary to a secondary site.
Azure Site Recovery protects virtual resources in many different infrastructure configurations in the cloud and on-premises. The Site Recovery protection includes replicating Azure VMs between Azure regions, Replication from Azure Public Multi-Access Edge Compute (MEC) to the region, replication between two Azure Public MECs, and on-premises VMs, Azure Stack VMs, and physical servers.
Azure Site Recovery is a fully integrated offering in Azure that is automatically updated with new Azure features when they are released. Using Azure Site Recovery, you can access the features and functionality needed for orchestrating business-continuity plans for multi-tier applications.
You can sequence the order of multi-tier applications running on multiple virtual machines and ensure compliance with recovery testing capabilities. It also provides automatic recovery of applications from on-premises to Azure. You can also keep applications available between Azure regions.
Azure Site Recovery features
There are many great features included with the Azure Site Recovery solution, including the following:
- BCDR solution – With Azure Site Recovery, you can configure replication, failover capabilities, and even failback to your primary data center, all from within the Azure portal
- Azure virtual machine replication – You can replicate Azure VMs from a primary region to a secondary region
- VMware VM replication – Azure Site Recovery is not limited to Microsoft virtualization technologies. You can replicate VMware virtual machines to Azure using the Azure Site Recovery replication appliance, with many security and resiliency benefits
- On-premises VM replication – Replication is not limited to cloud solutions. You can replicate your on-premises virtual machines to the cloud, bolstering your ability to recover from an on-premises disaster
- Hyper-V VM replication – You can replicate your Hyper-V virtual machines using the Azure Site Recovery solution
- Physical workload replication – Using the Azure Site Recovery agent, you can replicate your physical workloads running Windows and Linux to Microsoft Azure
- Continuous and near-continuous replication – Having up-to-date data is becoming increasingly important for most organizations. Azure Site Recovery allows admins to configure as low as 30-second replication for Hyper-V virtual machines and continuous replication for VMware and Azure virtual machines
- Application consistency – Backing up and replicating applications is crucial. Azure Site Recovery ensures your applications are replicated consistently, protecting your database-driven applications from corruption
Azure Site Recovery Configuration server
When replicating your on-premises VMware VMs and physical servers to Azure, you need to deploy what Microsoft calls a configuration server. The configuration server coordinates the communications between your VMware environment and Azure. It is also responsible for data replication activities.
Microsoft has also provided the configuration server as an OVA template to download when configuring your Azure Site Recovery vault. The provided OVA makes deploying the configuration server much easier.
Protecting Microsoft Hyper-V on-premises is a bit easier since you don’t have to deploy the Azure Site Recovery configuration server. Instead, you install what Microsoft calls the Azure Site Recovery Provider. It is essentially an agent you install on your Hyper-V hosts from which you want to set up replication.
It includes the following configuration and setup:
- Run the Azure Site Recovery Provider installer
- In the Azure Site Recovery Provider Setup wizard > Microsoft Update, opt-in to use Microsoft Update
- Accept the default installation location for the Provider and agent, and select Install
- Once installed, choose Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Registration Wizard > Vault Settings, and select Browse. In the Key File. The Key file is the server’s credentials to authenticate to access the Vault
- Specify the Azure Site Recovery subscription, the vault name, and the Hyper-V site to which the Hyper-V server belongs
- Select Connect directly to Azure Site Recovery without a proxy in Proxy Settings
- In Registration, select Finish after the server is registered in the Vault
Hyper-V Azure Site Recovery FAQs
Is Azure Site Recovery only for Hyper-V on-premises?
No, you can protect many types of workloads with Azure Site Recovery, including Azure to Azure workloads and on-premises VMware, Hyper-V, and physical workloads.
Do you need to install anything to use Azure Site Recovery?
You need to install the Azure Site Recovery configuration server for VMware and physical workloads. You can download a special OVA appliance for VMware environments to simplify deployment. For Hyper-V, you must install the Azure Site Recovery provider, essentially an agent for each Hyper-V host from which you want to replicate.
How much does Azure Site Recovery cost?
According to the official pricing documentation, Azure Site Recovery to customer-owned sites is $16/month per instance protected. For Azure Site Recovery to Azure, it is $25/month per protected instance.
Wrapping up
A comprehensive and effective BCDR strategy involves protecting workloads at the site level. It also means having multiple copies of your business-critical data stored offsite. Azure Site Recovery is a solution from Microsoft allowing organizations to protect their critical Hyper-V, VMware, and physical workloads and replicate these offsite. In addition, Microsoft has streamlined the configuration process. Hyper-V replication only involves installing a simple Azure Site Recovery provider.
Related Links:
Azure Site Recovery | Microsoft Azure
Hyper-V disaster recovery architecture in Azure Site Recovery – Azure Site Recovery | Microsoft Learn
Follow our Twitter and Facebook feeds for new releases, updates, insightful posts and more.
