Questions about Azure site Replication and Azure VM backups

Question

I have several VMs in the West US Region, this is my main region.

I have a Recovery Service Vault in West US region, whose function is to perform backups of the VMs in the West US region.

I am going to be setting another Recovery Service Vault in the Central US region whose function would be to configure Azure Site Recovery.

My plan is that the Central US region will be my Disaster Recovery region.

So I have a couple of questions:

1. Is there way to get the backups that are currently in the West US region to the Central US region?
2. If I can't move/copy the backups from the West US region to the Central US region, can I change the backups for my VMs from the West US region to the Central US region? I'm assuming that when I do this I will lose all the current backups in the West US region.
3. If I do change the backups for my VMs from the West US region to the Central US region, can I also still use the Central US region as my Azure Site Recovery region?
4. How do I estimate the cost for doing Azure Site Recovery? The Azure price calculator has two options for VM instances, $16 and $25 but I'm not sure which applies

I guess what I'd like to be able to do, is use Azure Site Recovery to fall over to the Central US machines in the event of a West US region disaster. But only do that for mission critical servers and be able to restore other VMs from their backups. If the backups for the VMs are in the West US region, then I wouldn't be able to restore them in the Central US region.

Thanks

Answer 1

@Nicholas Palmer Here are the answers to your questions - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/details/site-recovery/?ef_id=k_Cj0KCQjwj_ajBhCqARIsAA37s0xFiWs15LyIHwCjtRhEGIu7iK1Qk4ZWkT3dB8BS07tsJLz0C4JOCukaAiBwEALw_wcB_k&OCID=AIDcmmf1elj9v5_SEM__k_Cj0KCQjwj_ajBhCqARIsAA37s0xFiWs15LyIHwCjtRhEGIu7iK1Qk4ZWkT3dB8BS07tsJLz0C4JOCukaAiBwEALw_wcB_k_&gclid=Cj0KCQjwj_ajBhCqARIsAA37s0xFiWs15LyIHwCjtRhEGIu7iK1Qk4ZWkT3dB8BS07tsJLz0C4JOCukaAiBwEALw_wcB

For question 4, once I go past the 31 days for free, it will be $25 per replicated machine correct? Does the size of the machines storage matter?

You can also use Azure Site Recovery Deployment planner to get price estimation/quotation to understand how much you would pay for your current set up.

Reference doc - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/site-recovery-deployment-planner

Hope this answers your question. Please reply if you have any further questions!

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Answer 2

Hello @Nicholas Palmer

Thank you for posting this concern on this community.

I would like to gather my 2 cents on this... So, please read the following observations down below:

1. Is there way to get the backups that are currently in the West US region to the Central US region?

Answer:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/reliability/migrate-recovery-services-vault?tabs=backup

2. If I can't move/copy the backups from the West US region to the Central US region, can I change the backups for my VMs from the West US region to the Central US region?

I'm assuming that when I do this I will lose all the current backups in the West US region.

Answer: Azure Key Vault does not allow you to move a key vault from one region to another. You can, however, create a key vault in the new region, manually copy each individual key, secret, or certificate from your existing key vault to the new key vault, and then remove the original key vault.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/key-vault/general/move-region

3. If I do change the backups for my VMs from the West US region to the Central US region, can I also still use the Central US region as my Azure Site Recovery region?

Answer:

You can use a separate key vault for Backup and Azure Site recovery services. If I am not mistaken this feature can enabled as well "Storage replication type".

4. How do I estimate the cost for doing Azure Site Recovery? The Azure price calculator has two options for VM instances, $16 and $25 but I'm not sure which applies

Answer:

That depends on because remember that for instance, if you enable recovery services for the first time, the first 31 days are free of charge.

Furthermore, you can either apply Reserved Instances or Saving plans as well.

I hope that might be useful for you and get it done.

Looking forward to hearing from you

Cheers,

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