Azure Site Recovery

Every organization needs a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy that keep apps,workloads and data safe and accessible during planned and unplanned downtime,and recovers to normal working conditions as soon as possible.Site Recovery is an Azure service that contributes to this strategy.

You can replicate servers and VMs from a primary data center to the cloud (Azure) or to a secondary data center.When outages occur in the primary site, you fail over to the secondary site to keep apps and workloads accessible and available. You fail back to your primary location when it returns to normal operations.

Site Recovery in the Azure portal

Azure has two different deployment models for creating and working with resources;They are: Azure Resource Manager model and the classic services management model. Azure also has two portals – the Azure classic portal that supports the classic deployment model, and the Azure portal with support for both the classic and Resource Manager models.

• Site Recovery is available in both the classic portal and the Azure portal.
• In the Azure classic portal, you can support Site Recovery with the classic services management model.
• In the Azure portal, you can support the classic model or Resource Manager deployments.

Why deploy Site Recovery?

Here's what Site Recovery can do for your business:

• Simplify BCDR—You can handle replication, failover and recovery of multiple workloads in a single location in the Azure portal. Site recovery orchestrates replication and failover but doesn't intercept your application data or have any information about it.
• Provide flexible replication—Using Site Recovery, you can replicate workloads running on supported Hyper-V VMs, VMware VMs, and Windows/Linux physical servers.
• Perform easy replication testing—Site Recovery provides test failovers to support disaster recovery drills, without affecting production environments.
• Fail over and recover— You can run planned failovers for expected outages with a zero-data-loss, or unplanned failovers with minimal data loss (depending on replication frequency) for unexpected disasters. After failover, you can failback to your primary sites. Site Recovery provides recovery plans that can include scripts and Azure automation workbooks, so that you can customize failover and recovery of multi-tier applications.
• Eliminate a secondary datacenter—You can replicate workloads to Azure, rather than to a secondary site. This eliminates the cost and complexity maintaining a secondary data center Replicated data is stored in Azure Storage, with all the resilience that provides. VMs are created with the replicated data when failover occurs.
• Integrate with existing BCDR technologies—Site Recovery integrates with other BCDR features. For example, you can use Site Recovery to protect the SQL Server backend of corporate workloads, including native support for SQL Server AlwaysOn, to manage the failover of availability groups.

What can I replicate?

Here's a summary of what you can replicate using Site Recovery.