In this demonstration, I'll show you how ASR, Azure Site Recovery, works.
Let me open up the Azure portal here and zoom in a little bit. You
can see I have two Recovery Services vaults.
My primary one here where my workloads are is East US, and
then I'm using West US as my failover.
So let me show you how to set up ASR.
It's going to depend on whether you're protecting
Azure machines or on‑prem machines.
Let's go into my primary vault, and we'll come down here under Getting
started, Site Recovery, and we see this interface, I guess, for lack of
a better term, that shows you the different topologies, if you're going
to do Azure to Azure protection,
if you're looking to protect VMware or Hyper‑V machines into Azure,
if you're going to do cloud to local,
all the different topologies. What I want you to see
is from a top‑line perspective,
it's incredibly easy to replicate your virtual machines from region to
region. To show you that, actually, let me open up another browser tab as I
normally do, and we could go to an individual VM here in the portal. I'll
grab one that's running here. Let's pick on web1, and just like how we can
enable backup on a single VM basis,
we can go to disaster recovery, and with a couple of mouse clicks,
you've got yourself this failover relationship.
Now, the issue with this is that this makes it really easy to
replicate Azure to Azure, region to region,
but this would lead you to think that there is not any orchestration.
The point of ASR really isn't so much protecting
individual VMs, it's entire workloads.
So the two main paths that I want you to look at for the purpose
of the exam are Hyper‑V protection on one hand,
and VMware protection on the other.
So, if we look at the Hyper‑V scenario,
we prepare the infrastructure, and it's going to
step us through a number of steps,
including verifying that we've run the deployment planner.
The Azure Site Recovery deployment planner,
believe it or not,
is a command‑line executable that you can use to inspect your local environment.
Once you've done that, you're ready to start setting things up.
And as you can see, it asks,
are you orchestrating your Hyper‑V hosts with System
Center Virtual Machine Manager, which I'll say no.
And then you create what's called a site.
The site might be, for instance,
a particular data center into which you then add one or more
Hyper‑V servers. And you can see I've already added one in,
mem3.timw.info. What does that mean?
Well, Microsoft made this to where you have minimal reliance on agents.
In other words,
what you need to do is install the Microsoft Azure Site Recovery provider
and install that agent on each of your Hyper‑V hosts. Not the guest VMs,
understand, the Hyper‑V hosts. When you install that Azure Site Recovery
provider on your Hyper‑V hosts,
you'll then handshake or register into the Recovery
Services vault by importing this vault registration key
that you download in a separate step.
So the bottom line is, it's a much lighter impact to your
on‑premises environment when you're looking to replicate
and protect local machines.
All right.
So you step through and you choose your sites and servers,
and then you determine target settings,
which is going to be where you want the failover to take place.
I've configured mine to failover to the West US where I've created
a recovery plan, and so on, and I'll show you that momentarily. And
then we have a replication policy.
What is a replication policy?
Well, it's analogous to a backup policy.
You specify what source, in this case, it's Hyper‑V, what your
target is, and then your copy frequency,
how many recovery points and snapshots you want, a little bit of
metadata on how the actual replication will take place.
Now it gets more complicated when you have a VMware environment. Let's go into
Prepare Infrastructure there, and you're going to have to download a
pre‑configured virtual machine image. This is a Windows server eval licensed
image that you'll stand up in your environment.
Now,
another requirement is that you have to have your ESXi hosts, your VMware
hosts, orchestrated under vCenter. So you're going to need to work. In fact,
this ASR replication appliance will work in conjunction with vCenter, and
that allows you to get past having to worry about installing agents on every
one of your virtual machines.
What is the purpose of that Prepare Infrastructure step for Hyper‑V and
VMware? It's enabling you to equip those virtualization hosts to enumerate
the VMs and make them then available when you enable replication and then
ultimately create your recovery plans.
You see what I mean? When you set up replication for
Hyper‑V, as you can see again,
you specify your Hyper‑V site to start with, and then
you set up your target environment.
In this case, I want my local Hyper‑V infrastructure and VMs to
failover into my DR, or Disaster Recovery VNet, and then I would
select which subnet or subnets.
Now, the virtual machine selection is important because the idea, again,
is that you've got an orchestrated collection of
machines that you want to replicate, you see? It's not just necessarily one. Let me select the DR subnet and click Next.