About Site Recovery
Welcome to the Azure Site Recovery service! This article provides a quick service overview.
As an organization, you need to adopt a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy that keeps your data safe, and your apps and workloads online, when planned and unplanned outages occur.
Azure Recovery Services contributes to your BCDR strategy:
- Site Recovery service: Site Recovery helps ensure business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages. Site Recovery replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VMs) from a primary site to a secondary location. When an outage occurs at your primary site, you fail over to a secondary location, and access apps from there. After the primary location is running again, you can fail back to it.
- Backup service: The Azure Backup service keeps your data safe and recoverable.
Azure Site Recovery has an option of High Churn, enabling you to configure disaster recovery for Azure VMs having data churn up to 100 MB/s. This helps you to enable disaster recovery for more IO intensive workloads. Learn more.
Site Recovery can manage replication for:
- Azure VMs replicating between Azure regions
- Replication from Azure Public Multi-Access Edge Compute (MEC) to the region
- Replication between two Azure Public MECs
- On-premises VMs, Azure Stack VMs, and physical servers
Note
The Azure Site Recovery functionality for Public MEC is in preview state.
What does Site Recovery provide?
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| Simple BCDR solution | Using Site Recovery, you can set up and manage replication, failover, and failback from a single location in the Azure portal. |
| Azure VM replication | You can set up disaster recovery of Azure VMs from a primary region to a secondary region or from Azure Public MEC to the Azure region or from one Azure Public MEC to another Azure Public MEC connected to the same Azure region. |
| VMware VM replication | You can replicate VMware VMs to Azure using the improved Azure Site Recovery replication appliance that offers better security and resilience than the configuration server. For more information, see Disaster recovery of VMware VMs. |
| On-premises VM replication | You can replicate on-premises VMs and physical servers to Azure. Replication to Azure eliminates the cost and complexity of maintaining a secondary datacenter. |
| Workload replication | Replicate any workload running on supported Azure VMs, on-premises Hyper-V and VMware VMs, and Windows/Linux physical servers. |
| Data resilience | Site Recovery orchestrates replication without intercepting application data. When you replicate to Azure, data is stored in Azure storage, with the resilience that provides. When failover occurs, Azure VMs are created based on the replicated data. This also applies to Public MEC to Azure region Azure Site Recovery scenario. In case of Azure Public MEC to Public MEC Azure Site Recovery scenario (the Azure Site Recovery functionality for Public MEC is in preview state), data is stored in the Public MEC. |
| RTO and RPO targets | Keep recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) within organizational limits. Site Recovery provides continuous replication for Azure VMs and VMware VMs, and replication frequency as low as 30 seconds for Hyper-V. You can reduce RTO further by integrating with Azure Traffic Manager. |
| Keep apps consistent over failover | You can replicate using recovery points with application-consistent snapshots. These snapshots capture disk data, all data in memory, and all transactions in process. |
| Testing without disruption | You can easily run disaster recovery drills, without affecting ongoing replication. |
| Flexible failovers | You can run planned failovers for expected outages with zero-data loss. Or, unplanned failovers with minimal data loss, depending on replication frequency, for unexpected disasters. You can easily fail back to your primary site when it's available again. |
| Customized recovery plans | Using recovery plans, you can customize and sequence the failover and recovery of multi-tier applications running on multiple VMs. You group machines together in a recovery plan, and optionally add scripts and manual actions. Recovery plans can be integrated with Azure Automation runbooks. Note: This functionality is currently supported for Region-to-Region replication and will be available on Azure Public MEC soon. |
| BCDR integration | Site Recovery integrates with other BCDR technologies. For example, you can use Site Recovery to protect the SQL Server backend of corporate workloads, with native support for SQL Server Always On, to manage the failover of availability groups. |
| Azure automation integration | A rich Azure Automation library provides production-ready, application-specific scripts that can be downloaded and integrated with Site Recovery. |
| Network integration | Site Recovery integrates with Azure for application network management. For example, to reserve IP addresses, configure load-balancers, and use Azure Traffic Manager for efficient network switchovers. |
| Shared disk (preview) | You can protect, monitor, failover, and re-protect your workloads running on Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC) on Azure VMs using shared disk. You can use shared disks for your critical applications such as SQL FCI, SAP ASCS, Scale-out File Servers, etc., while ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery with Azure Site Recovery. |
What can I replicate?
| Supported | Details |
|---|---|
| Replication scenarios | Replicate Azure VMs from 1. One Azure region to another. 2. Azure Public MEC to the Azure region it's connected to. 3. One Azure Public MEC to another Public MEC connected to same Azure region. Replicate on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers (Windows and Linux), Azure Stack VMs to Azure. Replicate AWS Windows instances to Azure. Replicate on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs managed by System Center VMM, and physical servers to a secondary site. |
| Regions | Review supported regions for Site Recovery. |
| Replicated machines | Review the replication requirements for Azure VM replication, on-premises VMware VMs and physical servers, and on-premises Hyper-V VMs. |
| Workloads | You can replicate any workload running on a machine that's supported for replication. Learn more about the app-specific workload summary. |
Next steps
- Read more about workload support.
- Get started with Azure VM replication between regions.
- Get started with VMware VM replication.
- Get started with Disaster recovery for VMs on Azure Public MEC.