Failback to physical server using ASR

Question

Hi Team,

On on-premises location, we have SAP app server on VMWare environment and SAP HANA DB on physical server. we are planning for failover and failback DR using ASR. but while performing failback to OnPrem, how can we failback Azure SAP Hana DB VM to physical server at on-premise location.

I understood that failback to physical server is not possible using ASR tool. but what are other alternative solutions in azure to perform failback on physical server if not supported by ASR ? any third party tool we can use to failback to physical server ?

Please help.

Answer 1

Hello @Jayesh Sawant - Thank you for contacting us!

You can use any software that will copy a VHD to a physical disk could work. Just download the VHD from the failover VM in Azure and use something to copy that to a disk. Just keep in mind that this failback would be a manual process completely outside of ASR.

You could also failback to the VMWare host and then use some kind of 3rd party software to copy the VMDK to a physical disk. I can’t make any recommendations on what software to use because I’ve never used any to do that.

We don’t support any failback to physical because servers can be quite complex in their hardware. So, simply copying a VHD or VMDK to a physical disk might mean you’d need to copy across a RAID array or SAN. You’d likely need to boot into a recovery environment in order to copy the data to the physical server.

To add to this as an alternative, you could also leverage SAP replication instead of using Azure site recovery.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/sap/sap-hana-high-availability

Hope this helps!

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