Azure Site Recovery

Hyper-V–to–Azure disaster recovery

Companies that use Hyper-V with or without System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) can benefit from using ASR to set up a disaster recovery for their on-premises environment in Azure. Considering the costs associated with ASR and its comprehensive integration with Hyper-V and SCVMM, it is an ideal solution for organizations of any size.

In the past, setting up a disaster-recovery (DR) site meant hosting infrastructure in another datacenter and managing all the associated networking components, upgrades, and updates for each infrastructure layer on an ongoing basis. Due to the initial setup and ongoing maintenance costs of such a design, most small and mid-size businesses shied away from setting up a DR site, and instead relied on offsite backups for their recovery strategy. Today, however, thanks to cost benefits and ease of management and maintenance, all organizations can benefit from ASR.

ASR supports Hyper-V hosts starting from Windows Server 2012 R2 (with the latest updates) to the latest Windows Server release. Similarly, for VMM, the minimum supported version is Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 to the latest release.

For Hyper-V VMs, you can replicate all VMs that are supported for hosting in Azure. It is therefore important that you check for the most recent guidance from Microsoft published online regarding the latest support matrix for Hyper-V hosts, VMM servers, and Hyper-V VMs. This guidance changes from time to time as different operating systems reach end of life or end of support.

Replication components

ASR uses different components, depending on your Hyper-V environment:

• Hyper-V with VMM/Hyper-V cluster with VMM In this scenario (see Figure 2-24), you deploy the ASR Provider agent on the VMM server and the Recovery Services agent on each Hyper-V host. The Hyper-V VMs do not require anything to be installed on them.

• Hyper-V without VMM/Hyper-V cluster without VMM In this scenario, you deploy the ASR Provider agent and Recovery Services agent on each Hyper-V host. The Hyper-V VMs do not require anything to be installed on them. (See Figure 2-25.)

Each scenario requires you to provision a Recovery Services vault, a storage account, and a virtual network in the same Azure region to reference during replication setup. Replication can be set as frequently as every 30 seconds (except in scenarios where premium storage is used for replication) or as infrequently as every 5 minutes, enabling you to achieve extremely low recovery point objectives and low data loss.