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Azure VM Disaster Recovery - High Churn Support

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Azure Site Recovery supports churn (data change rate) up to 100 MB/s per VM. You will be able to protect your Azure VMs having high churning workloads (like databases) using the High Churn option in Azure Site Recovery which supports churn up to 100 MB/s per VM. You may be able to achieve better RPO performance for your high churning workloads. With the default Normal Churn option, you can support churn only up to 54 MB/s per VM.

Limitations

  • Available only for DR of Azure VMs.
  • Recommend VM SKUs with RAM of min 32GB.
  • Source disks must be Managed Disks.

Note

This feature is available in all public regions where Azure Site Recovery is supported and premium block blobs are available. However, this feature is not yet available in any Government cloud regions. When using High Churn with any other regions outside the supported regions, replication and/or reprotection may fail.

Data change limits

  • These limits are based on our tests and don't cover all possible application I/O combinations.
  • Actual results may vary based on your app I/O mix.
  • There are two limits to consider:
    • per disk data churn
    • per virtual machine data churn.
  • Limit per virtual machine data churn - 100 MB/s.

The following table summarizes Site Recovery limits:

Target Disk Type Avg I/O Size Avg Churn Supported
Standard or P10 or P15 8 KB 2 MB/s
Standard or P10 or P15 16 KB 4 MB/s
Standard or P10 or P15 24 KB 6 MB/s
Standard or P10 or P15 32 KB and above 10 MB/s
P20 8 KB 10 MB/s
P20 16 KB 20 MB/s
P20 24 KB and above 30 MB/s
P30 and above 8 KB 20 MB/s
P30 and above 16 KB 35 MB/s
P30 and above 24 KB and above 50 MB/s

How to enable High Churn support

From Recovery Service Vault

  1. Select source VMs on which you want to enable replication. To enable replication, follow the steps here.

  2. Under Replication Settings > Storage, select View/edit storage configuration. The Customize target settings page opens.

    Screenshot of Replication settings storage.

  3. Under Churn for the VM, there are two options:

    • Normal Churn (this is the default option) - You can get up to 54 MB/s per VM. Select Normal Churn to use Standard storage accounts only for Cache Storage. Hence, Cache storage dropdown will list only Standard storage accounts.

    • High Churn - You can get up to 100 MB/s per VM. Select High Churn to use Premium Block Blob storage accounts only for Cache Storage. Hence, Cache storage dropdown will list only Premium Block blob storage accounts.

      Screenshot of churn.

  4. Select High Churn from the dropdown option.

    Screenshot of high-churn.

    If you select multiple source VMs to configure Site Recovery and want to enable High Churn for all these VMs, select High Churn at the top level.

  5. After you select High Churn for the VM, you will see Premium Block Blob options only available for cache storage account. Select cache storage account and then select Confirm Selection.

    Screenshot of Cache storage.

  6. Configure other settings and enable the replication.

From Azure VM screen

  1. In the portal, go to Virtual machines and select the VM.

  2. On the left pane, under Operations, select Disaster recovery.

    Screenshot of Disaster recovery page.

  3. Under Basics, select the Target region and then select Next: Advanced settings.

  4. Under Advanced settings, select Subscription, VM resource group, Virtual network, Availability, and Proximity placement group as required.

  5. Under Advanced settings > Storage settings, select [+] Show details.

    Screenshot of Storage show details.

  6. Under Storage settings > Churn for the VM, select High Churn. You will be able to use Premium Block Blob type of storage accounts only for cache storage.

    Screenshot of Churn for VM.

  7. Select Next: Review + Start replication.

Note

  • You can only enable High Churn only when you enable replication while configuring Azure Site Recovery on a VM.
  • If you want to enable High Churn support for VMs already protected by Azure Site Recovery, disable replication for those VMs and select High Churn while enabling replication again. Similarly, disable and enable replication again to switch back to Normal Churn.

Cost Implications

  • High Churn uses Premium Block Blob storage accounts which may have higher cost implications as compared to Normal Churn which uses Standard storage accounts. For more information, see pricing.
  • For High churn VMs, more data changes may get replicated to target for High churn compared to Normal churn. This may lead to more network cost.