Oracle Database with ASM on Oracle Linux VM in Azure will support for Azure Site recovery for Disaster recovery case

Question

We are currently using Oracle 12C/ Oracle Linux 6.0 on Azure VM with regular storage (Premium SSD) with ASM. We are looking for information about setting up Oracle DR using Azure Site Recovery. Specifically, we want to know if Azure Site Recovery is capable of replicating Oracle VM to secondary sites without any issues and what the limitations are on Azure Site Recovery to replicate Oracle VM with DB on ASM. Additionally, please share the limitations or recommendation for failover/switchover, and if so, provide a list of the issues which may occur during Oracle DR VM creation? Lastly, please share any web links or documentation about Oracle Warm DR Setup using Azure Site Recovery.

Answer 1

Hello @Deepak Bhardwaj Thank you for reaching out to us on Microsoft Q&A platform. Happy to help!

Based on the information you shared in your post, I understand your requirement to enable DR using Azure Site Recovery for your 12C/ Oracle Linux 6.0 running on Azure VM and wanted to know the limitations and recommendations/best practices.

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is an application agnostic solution and works at a VM level. It does not know what workloads are running inside the VM. Hence, it can replicate Oracle DB at VM level. However, following points should be considered:

1. Oracle DB generally have higher churn (data change) rate than ASR can support. Doc reference: Azure VM Disaster Recovery - High Churn Support
2. ASR takes crash consistent recovery points by default. You have to configure for application consistency in case you want to use application consistency. Reference article - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/azure-to-azure-architecture  

In case you want to use ASR, we would request you to try out ASR along with your scenario in the test lab first.

Note: For DR, ask an Oracle expert. I think they use Oracle native tools as ours (ASR) don't work well for Oracle.

There is no mention of ASR in this MS doc - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/oracle/oracle-disaster-recovery#approach-2-site-to-site-vpn. The set up used Active-Data Guard.

Also in this doc - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/oracle/oracle-vm-solutions it is mentioned that if you are planning for HA and DR in Azure, you need to also plan backup strategy as part of DR.

Again, I would suggest you contact an Oracle expert to get appropriate guidance for this requirement.

Hope this helps!

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