Setting up Disaster Recovery Site on AZURE

Why building disaster recovery site on the cloud?

Now a days we can see a lot of disasters that can take place which might affect your datacenter, so If you don’t a good business continuity and disaster recovery plan, this will affect your critical applications.

Building your disaster recovery site on the cloud is a great option as it:

• Provide you GEO redundancy.
• You can setup your Infrastructure fast.
• Pay for what you use. (You don’t pay for virtual machines until they are running)

Let’s know more about AZURE Site Recovery to build a disaster recovery site on AZURE.

Architecture

Components

• DNS traffic is routed via Traffic Managerwhich can easily move traffic from one site to another based on policies defined by your organization.
• Azure Site Recoveryorchestrates the replication of machines and manages the configuration of the failback procedures.
• Blob storagestores the replica images of all machines that are protected by Site Recovery.
• Azure Active Directoryis the replica of the on-premises Azure Active Directory services allowing cloud applications to be authenticated and authorized by your company.
• VPN Gateway: The VPN gateway maintains the communication between the on-premises network and the cloud network securely and privately.
• Virtual Network: The virtual network is where the failover site will be created when a disaster occurs.

How does Site Recovery do disaster recovery?

1. After preparing Azure and your on-premises site, you set up and enable replication for your on-premises machines.
2. Site Recovery orchestrates initial replication of the machine, in accordance with your policy settings.
3. After the initial replication, Site Recovery replicates delta changes to Azure.
4. When everything’s replicating as expected, you run a disaster recovery drill.
   • The drill helps ensure that failover will work as expected when a real need arises.
   • The drill performs a test failover without impacting your production environment.
5. If an outage occurs, you run a full failover to Azure. You can fail over a single machine, or you can create a recovery plan that fails over multiple machines at the same time.
6. On failover, Azure VMs are created from the VM data in Managed disks or storage accounts. Users can continue accessing apps and workloads from the Azure VM
7. When your on-premises site is available again, you fail back from Azure.
8. After you fail back and are working from your primary site once more, you start replicating on-premises VMs to Azure again.

Implementation Steps

• Create new virtual network on AZURE for disaster recovery (256 IP).
• Create Site-to-Site VPN tunnel between On-Premises and AZURE Hub network.
• Peer the new created virtual network to the Hub virtual network on AZURE.
• Extend On-Premises Active Directory to AZURE.
• Create new AZURE Recovery Service Vault
  1. Prepare Infrastructure (Setup a new ASR replication appliance).
  2. Enable replication.
  3. Manage recovery plans.
• Create and configure AZURE Traffic Manager.
• Test failover.

References

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/solution-ideas/articles/disaster-recovery-enterprise-scale-dr

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/site-recovery/#overview

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/vmware-azure-tutorial

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/tree/main/articles/site-recovery

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/blob/main/articles/site-recovery/vmware-azure-about-disaster-recovery.md

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/vpn-gateway/tutorial-site-to-site-portal

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/hybrid/whatis-azure-ad-connect

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/traffic-manager/#overview

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/traffic-manager/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtZWrtpyp9c