Azure VM Disaster Recovery Public IP Addresses

Question

We have web applications hosted in IIS on an Azure VM with disaster recovery enabled to UK West. However, upon failing over, the fail over VM gets created with a new static public IP address and we cannot move our source VM IP address to UK West as public IP addresses are regional redundant only.

• VM configured in UK South within an availability zone.
• VM has a static public IP addresses.

What would be the best way to configure disaster recovery, as at the minute, our only 2 options are:

• Zone to Zone disaster recovery in order to be able to move the source VM IP address over to the fail over VM.
• Update our web application domain's A records to point to the failover VM's IP address which is very time consuming.

Briefly had a look at a few options like a public load balancer, Front Door, etc... which I can then hook up to the fail over VM in the backend, but would appreciate any ideas before I look deeply further?

Answer 1

Hello RSKenzz

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Platform, thanks for posting your query here.

Based on the information you have provided, it seems that you are facing an issue with retaining the same public IP address for your failover VM after a disaster recovery event. As you have mentioned, public IP addresses are regional redundant only, and hence, you cannot move your source VM IP address to UK West.

One possible solution to this problem is to use Azure Traffic Manager. Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that enables you to distribute traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions, while providing high availability and responsiveness. You can use Traffic Manager to direct traffic to the failover VM in UK West after a disaster recovery event.

With this setup, Traffic Manager will direct traffic to your source VM in UK South as long as it is available. In the event of a disaster recovery event, Traffic Manager will automatically switch traffic to your failover VM in UK West, ensuring that your web application remains available to your users.

I hope this helps!