You can use the Azure Site Recovery service to protect your on-premises physical servers and VMware virtual machines, and to replicate and failover them to Azure. The solution is designed to meet a range of business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) requirements by orchestrating and automating replication, failover, and failback of on-premises and cloud-based VMs. You can also use it to protect your virtual machine deployments in multiple regions.
To get started, you must prepare your environment. You must install the Azure Site Recovery replication provider, create an Azure vault, and configure replication settings. You can choose between continuous replication or scheduled replication to replicate your on-premises VMs to Azure. You can also choose to replicate between two different Azure regions, or across a zone pair. Before you begin, make sure that your hardware meets the required configuration and support requirements for this scenario.
In this article, you will learn how to set up a disaster recovery plan using azure site recovery step by step. You will learn how to protect on-premises VMs and VMware vSphere clusters by setting up replication. You will also learn how to recover a VM after an on-premises or Azure failover. Finally, you will learn how to test your disaster recovery plan with a planned or unplanned failure.
Before you enable Site Recovery, you must create an Azure vault in which to store your recovery data and virtual machine backups. In the Azure portal, select Create a resource and then search for Recovery services vault. In the Create a recovery services vault window, enter a friendly name for your vault in the Vault name field. You must also select a storage account in which to store your data. Then, select a location to host your recovery services vault. The default location is the same region in which you create your VMs.
You must assign a policy to your VMs. The policy enables Site Recovery for the VMs and specifies the replication settings that the service uses to capture app-consistent snapshots. The replication settings include how frequently the service creates a recovery point, and how long to retain each recovery point. You can also modify the target availability zone for a VM after you enable Site Recovery.
You can also specify tags to logically organize your replicated VMs into a taxonomy. For example, you can tag your VMs with a label such as Production or Development. You can use these tags to easily find your VMs in the recovery portal and dashboard. In addition, you can use tags to filter your VMs in the portal and dashboard. You can also use the tags to quickly recover or re-protect a VM.