Azure Site Recovery and DR Setup in Secondary Region

Hi ,

Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A. Its always best practice to keep your question short and focused to a single point. This will invite more experts to pitch in and offer their perspective.

ASR is primarily designed for DR, ensuring that VMs are replicated and can be recovered in a secondary region. However, there are important nuances to consider regarding configurations such as availability sets, load balancers, and other dependencies.

Answers to Your Questions:

1. Does ASR replicate Availability Sets, Load Balancers, and other configurations?
   • ASR replicates the VMs but not the entire environment configuration (Load Balancers, Availability Sets, Virtual Network Peering, etc.).
   • You must manually configure the secondary region's networking, including:

     - Virtual Networks (ensure subnets match the primary region).
     
           - Availability Sets (if used in the primary, create one in the secondary).
     
                 - Load Balancers (create a new one and manually add the replicated VMs to the backend pool).
     
                 - ASR does replicate the VM's OS disk, data disks, NIC settings, and VM size, but you need to recreate dependencies manually.
     

Will the secondary region remain in passive mode, and will Azure not charge until it is active?

• The secondary region remains passive, but Azure charges for the storage and replication of VM disks.
  • Charges include:

     - Storage costs for replicated data.
    
           - ASR replication costs.
    
                 - Compute costs only when the VMs are failed over.
    

1. Will the replication automatically switch over to the secondary region in case of a primary region failure?

• No, ASR does not perform automatic failover.
• You must manually initiate a failover when needed.
  • Failover types:
    • Test Failover - to verify DR readiness.
    • Planned Failover - for controlled failovers.
    • Unplanned Failover - for unexpected outages.

1. Do we need to enable cross region restore for ASR to work correctly?
   • No, cross-region restore is a backup feature, not related to ASR.
     • ASR works with replication and failover rather than restoring from backups.

Why don't I see the VMs under "Enable Replication" in the Recovery Services Vault (RSV)?

• Possible reasons:

- The VMs may not be compatible with ASR. Check if the VM size/type is supported for replication.

- The VMs are already protected (check under "Replicated Items" in ASR).

- The Recovery Services Vault isn't configured for the right region.

- The Azure Policy or RBAC permissions may restrict visibility.

Recommendations for Full DR Setup:

• Manually deploy the Load Balancer, Availability Set, and Virtual Network in the secondary region.
• Use ASR Recovery Plans to automate post-failover steps, such as attaching the VMs to the Load Balancer.
• Test Failover regularly to validate the DR setup.

Please feel free to click the 'Upvote' (Thumbs-up) button and 'Accept as Answer'. This helps the community by allowing others with similar queries to easily find the solution.