Disaster recovery for different Azure regions
In this tutorial, we will learn about describing how to set up disaster recovery for an Azure VM by replicating it to a secondary Azure region. Talking about the Azure Site Recovery service, it provides business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy for keeping business applications online during planned and unplanned outages. Moreover, Site Recovery manages disaster recovery of on-premises machines and Azure virtual machines (VM), including replication, failover, and recovery.
Prerequisites
For this tutorial, you require an Azure subscription and a VM. However, if you don’t have an Azure account with an active subscription, then you can create an account for free. Also a VM with a minimum 1 GB of RAM is recommended.
Enabling replication for the Azure VM
The steps below enable VM replication to a secondary location.
- Firstly, on the Azure portal, from Home > Virtual machines menu, select a VM to replicate.
- Secondly, in Operations select Disaster recovery.
- Then, from Basics > Target region, select the target region.
- For viewing the replication settings, select Review + Start replication. However, if you need to change any defaults, select Advanced settings.
- Lastly, for starting the job that enables VM replication select Start replication.
Verify settings
After finishing the replication job, you can check the replication status, modify replication settings, and test the deployment.
- Firstly, on the Azure portal menu, select Virtual machines and select the VM that you replicated.
- Then, in Operations select Disaster recovery.
- Lastly, for viewing the replication details from the Overview select Essentials. For more details check the Health and status, Failover readiness, and the Infrastructure view map.
Cleaning up resources
For stopping VM replication in the primary region, you must disable replication:
- In which, the source replication settings are cleaned up automatically.
- And, the Site Recovery extension installed on the VM during replication isn’t removed.
- Lastly, Site Recovery billing for the VM stops.
For disabling replication, do these steps:
- Firstly, on the Azure portal menu, select Virtual machines, and select the VM that you replicated.
- Then, in Operations select Disaster recovery.
- After that, from the Overview, select Disable Replication.
- Lastly, for uninstalling the Site Recovery extension, go to the VM’s Settings > Extensions.
Reference: Microsoft Documentation