Azure Migrate - how to use for failover

Question

Hello,

We have a number of on-premise Hyper-V VMs. We are looking to backup a few of them to our Azure cloud in case our building would face a true disaster and be destroyed.

Would Azure VM "migration" be the ticket? We're not really looking to "migrate" as I understand the term, but rather, make a copy of the machine in Azure that we could spin up and fail over to if necessary.

I'm having difficulty sifting through the voluminous Microsoft documentation to get a clear answer on this. All I want is to know what time it is, and Microsoft wants to teach me how to build a clock.

Thanks for your help.

Zachary Hamilton

Answer 1

Hi Zachary,

I know what you mean, the number of services in Azure (and the documentation) is huge these days, so hard to sift through the weeds to find what you need.

From what you describe above, you are after "Azure Site Recovery".
This service will continuously replicate your existing Virtual Machines to an encrypted Recovery Services Vault. From there, you can then fail over (for testing or during a real disaster) to Azure.

Process at a high level:

• Setup the environment in Azure - How-to Guide
• Setup the on-premises side - How-to Guide
• Setup the replication - How-to Guide
• Run a test failover - How-to Guide
• Failover to Azure - How-To Guide

General overview of the service and all related documentation can be found here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/site-recovery-overview

Hope this helps, but let us know if you have any questions/problems,
Stephane

Answer 2

Another question if I may: I set up the virtual network with a different subnet. I did a test failover of the VM and it seems to be working according to the Azure dashboard. However, I can't connect to it through either RDP or Bastion (didn't try SSH). Is there a secret to this that will get me going quickly? I found some RDP troubleshooting docs, but again, it's quite a lot to go through for what I'm guessing would be a simple fix if I knew where to look.

Thanks,

Zach

Answer 3

Hey Zach,

The RDP connection should work, but there are a few things to watch out for:

• Since the IP addresses of the servers have changed, is Windows Firewall blocking the connection?
• How do you connect to the VNet? Are you using a VPN gateway or a public IP assigned to each VMs? If you are using a VPN Gateway, make sure that the server knows the route back to your workstation. If you are using Public IP, make sure the Windows Firewall allows the connection and that there is the appropriate NSG in place on the Subnet and NIC to allow the RDP connection.
• Are you allowing pings in Windows Firewall? If so, can you ping the VM? (i.e. is the network connectivity working and it's only RDP that doesn't work?)

In most cases that I see, Windows Firewall is the culprit in those situation...

Cheers,

Stephane

Answer 4

I didn't have a public IP assigned to the NIC. I got connected. Thanks for all your help.

Zachary Hamilton