Azure Site Recovery, or ASR. We examined Azure Site
Recovery quite a bit in the previous module,
but that was the backup and restore solution, and I had mentioned
in that point that Azure Site Recovery has an entirely other part
to it, and that is a replication‑based business continuity disaster
recovery, or BCDR solution.
So this is for protecting workloads, such that you can fail
them over to another region or another data center or
another disaster recovery V‑Net,
there's plenty of different architectures, if you have a failure in
your primary environment with not exactly 0 downtime,
but a lot closer than what you'll attain in terms of
recovery time objective than if you were doing VM backup and
restore. Now, Azure Site Recovery,
although it's mainly intended, by Microsoft anyway,
it's mainly intended as a disaster recovery solution, and that's
absolutely true, but originally many Azure customers used the Azure
Site Recovery bits as a server migration solution.
In other words, you configure replication,
let's say, of your on‑premises Hyper‑V and VMware virtual machines into Azure,
get them synchronized,
create a failover where you cut over to the cloud, and then
stop replication, and then you're done.
And that's true, that works,
but you should know that nowadays we have a fully fleshed out product in
Azure that's called Azure Migrate Server Migration, and under the hood,
though, it's interesting to tell you this, that the Azure Migrate Server
Migration is, in fact, using Azure Site Recovery under the hood, it's just
abstracted away. So, long story short, we see that Azure Site Recovery,
both for the backup and restore stream, as well as the disaster
recovery stream, allows us to protect our workloads in multi‑cloud
environments, as well as hybrid‑cloud ones. And this is just basically
a marketing infographic from Microsoft.
As usual,
we have the attribution link in the lower left corner of the slide that shows
us some of the flexibility of ASR, that we can protect VMware and Hyper‑V
virtual machines running both Windows and Linux.
And we also have support for physical machines as well.
You might think, well, how does that work?
Well, if you were going to use ASR to replicate
physical machines from on‑prem into Azure,
hopefully it makes sense that in Azure those machines will run as VMs.
Now you're not going to be able to fail back to a physical machine, but
you could fail back to a VM on‑prem. This is for businesses that may be
thinking of decommissioning that hardware and performing a P2V, physical
to virtual conversion.
ASR has got you covered with that. We also,
as I mentioned, it's an Any OS situation,
so we have support both for the Linux‑endorsed Linux distributions,
as well as several versions of Windows Server.
The topologies that you can realize with Azure Site Recovery are pretty
powerful, and that is you can protect VMs, say, that are running in Amazon Web
Services, and configure them to fail over to Azure,
you see? Or you could do Azure to Azure. You could have your VM
workloads running in your primary region, and then have the failover in
another region so if there's a regional failure,
you're still online. And then, of course,
a very common solution is private cloud or on‑premises environment into Azure.
So I just want you to see that ASR is very flexible in how you can configure and schedule disaster recovery.