Microsoft Azure Site Recovery - Review 2022

Storage has been a core aspect of the Microsoft Azure service since its inception, so information technology's only natural that the company eventually extend that expertise to Disaster Recovery-equally-a-Service (DRaaS) and business continuity. Microsoft does this via Azure Site Recovery (ASR), which begins at $sixteen per calendar month per protected instance. Fifty-fifty though ASR is specific to Microsoft Azure, every bit compared to other solutions, like Zerto Virtual Replication, that offer third-party dorsum-cease cloud options like Amazon Web Services (AWS), its overnice price coupled with an easy-to-use yet sophisticated set up of backup, disaster recovery (DR), and reporting features earn it an Editors' Choice honor when compared to the rest of the contenders in our DRaaS solution review roundup.

While it seems merely logical that virtual machines would be a primary use case for ASR, given the popularity of Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform, it is possible to protect physical machines as well. Virtual automobile protection includes those running on the VMware platform along with Microsoft Hyper-5. ASR provides a dandy solution for protecting complex workloads involving multiple servers and services. This capability takes reward of Windows PowerShell and Azure Automation Runbooks to perform whatsoever number of configuration steps. Microsoft as well provides both detailed documentation and white papers for specific applications to help get yous going. While you'll become the about bang for your buck with ASR if you utilize Information technology staffers who are familiar with Windows Server, the service doesn't actually require IT intervention and certainly not configuration by Azure staff, similar yous have with Zetta Backup and Recovery.

Microsoft has a published listing of currently supported application-aware ASR solutions broken down past configuration blazon. Both Hyper-5 and VMware solutions support site-to-site and site-to-Azure target scenarios. Surprisingly, the VMware solution currently supports a wide range of site-to-site solutions, including Microsoft Exchange. Hyper-V back up of virtual Commutation workloads for site-to-Azure is listed as "coming soon" at the time of this writing. ASR does have other limitations, including a current maximum disk size of 1TB. The previous limitation of 127GB for OS disks has been removed in the latest release. Generation two virtual machines (VMs) are supported through a conversion process during failover and failback. Additionally, the company announced ASR support for its latest Microsoft Windows Server 2022 operating organization in November of 2022. As of that annunciation, Microsoft claims ASR customers can recover Windows Server 2022 operating system instances and workloads not simply to Azure but another information middle of their choice.

Installation

Azure Site Recovery supports two principal deployment scenarios for protecting both physical and virtual servers. For circuitous, multi-automobile scenarios Azure Site Recovery requires an installation of Microsoft System Middle Virtual Machine Managing director (SCVMM), which you need to gene into the overall cost of the solution especially if you lot have a big IT staff. SCVMM is not required for unmarried system protection, simply for anything beyond simply a few systems you'll demand it.

Installing Azure Site Recovery in the unmarried organisation case required me to constitute a Recovery Vault on Azure followed past a Hyper-Five Site within the Vault. Once these were created, I had to download the Azure Site Recovery Provider installer plus a key file, which links the local Hyper-5 host auto and Azure. Be advised that Windows Server 2022 TP4 is non currently supported equally a Hyper-5 host.

The terminal stride I had to achieve was to connect the local host with the Azure service using the previously created registration key file. This step only took a few minutes and, once accomplished, added the local machine to the Azure Site Recovery dashboard. With the system registered on Azure it was possible to schedule an initial backup of a target virtual machine with a single 13GB virtual disk. This was started tardily one evening and completed early on the following morn over an Internet connection with a 5MB upload rate.

Direction Interface

Microsoft Azure's direction dashboard has continued to evolve over the years. The newest Azure portal release uses responsive UI techniques to evangelize a fluid interface. While I had a little problem navigating to specific tasks at first, the search characteristic always helped me find what I was looking for. I found the Site Recovery documentation, which includes introductory material, planning documents plus detailed instructions on every step, to exist clearly written and easy to follow.

Failover testing is a disquisitional step to make sure your disaster recovery (DR) solution actually works. The Azure interface makes this as unproblematic equally one click. One click, that is, afterwards a good scrap of configuration steps. Fortunately, Microsoft provides a Quick Commencement page that outlines these steps, though it's not aimed at neophytes. Both an Azure storage account and virtual network must be created prior to initiating a failover. ASR uses the concept of a Protection Group to brand it easier to collect everything necessary to go an awarding back online running on Azure.

For complex scenarios, Microsoft offers a gallery of Azure automation runbooks to accomplish a diversity of configuration tasks. These include things like opening specific ports for remote desktop access or for Web access. Other runbooks make information technology possible to execute custom PowerShell commands once a system has failed over, which provides a serious heave to ASR, provided your Information technology staff has some in-house PowerShell skills. The Jobs tab shows a detailed history of all previous system actions and an export button for reporting purposes.

ASR Pricing

Azure Site Recovery is billed based on number of instances protected. Every example protected with Azure Site Recovery is costless for the first 31 days so billed at $16 per month for recovery to customer owned sites or $54 per month when protected to Azure. Y'all'll also pay for the storage used at rates from a low of $0.024 per GB for locally redundant storage (LRS) up to $0.061 per GB for Read-Access Geo Redundant (RA-GRS) storage. Prices go downwardly as your total storage increases.

Bottom line: you will pay roughly $lxxx per month to protect a single VM with up to 1TB of disk using locally redundant storage at ane Azure data center. That's a far cry from competitors similar Quorum onQ Hybrid Cloud Solution that are non only more expensive just too require dedicated on-site hardware.

Middling Performance

Azure Site Recovery is non solid as an instantaneous failover solution. In the case of an unplanned failover it can kickoff up the case of the most recently synced data in a adequately short corporeality of time, depending on the complexity of the workload, but that will still be measured in minutes or potentially fifty-fifty longer spans. Then again, for typical DRaaS use cases, instantaneous failover isn't much of an consequence when you're busy fleeing the office. The default setting for replication is set to 15 minutes. For pocket-size workloads involving but a few VMs, the fourth dimension to spin up in the Azure environment is minimal, and in our case just over 5 minutes.

Planned failovers perform a synchronization prior to the transferring execution from the local instance to the one running in Azure. I ran a planned failover on a single-VM instance which had been previously synced to Azure, and information technology required a total of one hour and 24 minutes. This included 39 minutes for data synchronization and 37 minutes to execute the failover.

Yous can tweak these numbers by managing your configuration and network settings matched against ongoing ASR reporting. ASR has some reporting available through its native management interface, but for best results, customers should employ reports obtained through Windows Server direction or Organisation Center. Azure Site Recovery provides a cost constructive solution for Microsoft-centric installations integrating with Microsoft System Heart offering a broad range of automation options for specific applications. For its overall depth of backup reporting features and workload options combined with the everyman toll of the agglomeration, Azure Site Recovery was the clear selection for Editors' Pick.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/microsoft-azure-site-recovery/10698/microsoft-azure-site-recovery

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