Use Case: Region to Region Azure Site Recovery

Pishoy Bous, Azure Technical Specialist

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides capabilities to automate protection and replication of virtual machines, providing a true Disaster Recovery as a Service Solution (DRaaS). ASR allows for data replication to multiple geographically dispersed regions, which provides a significant opportunity for cost savings while enhancing Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) and COOP capabilities.

Region to Region Azure Site Recovery was recently introduced in Azure Government. See the announcement here.

Recently, one of my customers enlisted my help to meet regulatory requirements such as NIST 800-53 and ISO 27001 to ensure their IT systems could sustain its mission though environmental changes. The customer had deployed their mission system in the Azure Government Texas Region. In order to ensure continuity of operations during events such as the recent hurricane the customer chose to replicate those virtual machines to another Azure region. With region to region Azure Site Recovery, we replicated their virtual machines to another Azure region over 500 miles apart within minutes.

The customer created a Backup and Recovery Vault through the Azure Portal. Then selected the source “Azure-PREVIEW” and the source location and resource group as shown in the example below.

Following selecting the source, the customer selected the virtual machines they wanted to replicate to the alternate Azure Region. (Note: Currently, VMs with managed disks are not supported)

Once the virtual machines were selected, the customer choose the target location along with specifying retention policies.

This began the initial replication synchronization. Once completed the customer could perform a failover manually, automate the failover through a recovery plan or perform a test failover without altering the production virtual machines. Additionally, test failover can be used to validate your replication strategy or perform a disaster recovery drill.

I encourage you to look at how Microsoft Azure Government’s region to region site recovery can enhancing your agencies Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) and COOP capabilities.

Next steps

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