Prepare Azure Site Recovery resources for disaster recovery of Azure VMware Solution VMs

Article
01/02/2023
3 minutes to read

This article describes how to prepare Azure resources and components so that you can set up disaster recovery of Azure VMware Solution VMs using Azure Site Recovery service. Azure VMware Solution provides private clouds in Azure. These private clouds contain vSphere clusters, built from dedicated bare-metal Azure infrastructure.

This article is the first tutorial in a series that shows you how to set up disaster recovery for Azure VMware Solution VMs.

In this tutorial, you learn how to:

Create a Recovery Services vault. A vault holds metadata and configuration information for VMs, and other replication components.
Set up an Azure virtual network (VNet). When Azure VMs are created after failover, they're joined to this network.

Note

Tutorials show you the simplest deployment path for a scenario. They use default options where possible, and don't show all possible settings and paths. For detailed instructions, review the article in the How To section of the Site Recovery Table of Contents.
Some of the concepts of using Azure Site Recovery for Azure VMware Solution overlap with disaster recovery of on-prem VMware VMs and hence documentation will be cross-referenced accordingly.

If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a free account before you begin. Then sign in to the Azure portal.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, verify the following:

Deploy an Azure VMware Solution private cloud in Azure
Review the architecture for VMware disaster recovery
Read common questions for VMware

Verify account permissions

If you just created your free Azure account, you're the administrator of your subscription and you have the permissions you need. If you're not the subscription administrator, work with the administrator to assign the permissions you need. To enable replication for a new virtual machine, you must have permission to:

Create a VM in the selected resource group.
Create a VM in the selected virtual network.
Write to an Azure storage account.
Write to an Azure managed disk.

To complete these tasks your account should be assigned the Virtual Machine Contributor built-in role. In addition, to manage Site Recovery operations in a vault, your account should be assigned the Site Recovery Contributor built-in role.

Create a recovery services vault

In the Azure portal, select Create a resource.
Search the Azure Marketplace for Recovery Services.
Select Backup and Site Recovery from the search results. Next, select Create.
In the Create Recovery Services vault page, under the Basics > Project details section, do the following:
1. Under Subscription, select the subscription in which you want to create the new recovery services vault.
2. In Resource group, select an existing resource group or create a new one. For example, contosoRG.
In the Create Recovery Services vault page, under Basics > Instance details section, do the following:
1. In Vault name, enter a friendly name to identify the vault. For example, ContosoVMVault.
2. In Region, select the region where the vault should be located. For example, (Europe) West Europe.
3. Select Review + create > Create to create the recovery vault.

Tip

To quickly access the vault from the dashboard, select Pin to dashboard.

The new vault appears on Dashboard > All resources, and on the main Recovery Services vaults page.

Screenshot of the Create Recovery Services vault page.

Set up an Azure network

Azure VMware Solution VMs are replicated to Azure managed disks. When failover occurs, Azure VMs are created from these managed disks, and joined to the Azure network you specify in this procedure.

In the Azure portal, select Create a resource.
Under categories, select Networking > Virtual network.
In Create virtual network page, under the Basics tab, do the following:
1. In Subscription, select the subscription in which to create the network.
2. In Resource group, select the resource group in which to create the network. For this tutorial, use the existing resource group contosoRG.
3. In Virtual network name, enter a network name. The name must be unique within the Azure resource group. For example, ContosoASRnet.
4. In Region, choose (Europe) West Europe. The network must be in the same region as the Recovery Services vault.
In Create virtual network > IP addresses tab, do the following:
1. As there's no subnet for this network, you will first delete the pre-existing address range. To do so, select the ellipsis (...), under available IP address range, then select Delete address space.
2. After deleting the pre-existing address range, select Add an IP address space.
3. In Starting address enter 10.0.0.
4. Under Address space size, select /24 (256 addresses).
5. Select Add.
Select Review + create > Create to create a new virtual network.