New disaster recovery options for Azure Virtual Machines

Microsoft is adding Azure Site Recovery (ASR), a way for users to replicate and failover virtual machines from a geographic cluster. Azure Availability Zones were first announced in September, 2017 and offer fault-isolated locations within an Azure region with extra cooling, power and networking capabilities for redundancy. However, after recent data center hiccups in 2018, Microsoft is taking no chances in the event that a natural disaster knocks out even the more redundant Availability Zones.

According to Sujay Talasila, senior program manager for cloud and enterprise, and author of the recent announcement, ASR lets users boost availability for mission-critical VMs by deploying the VMs across multiple zones within a region.

"Along with Availability Sets and Availability Zones, Azure Site Recovery completes the resiliency continuum for applications running on Azure Virtual Machines," he stated.

Users who want to configure for added availability can browse to the VM, select "disaster recovery," choose a target region and enable replication. "If the target region supports availability zones, you can configure your target VM to be deployed as a zone pinned VM. If not, you can configure the target VM to be deployed as a single instance or in an availability set. Once you failover to the target region and failback to the source region, the original zone configuration in source region stays intact. This ensures you can seamlessly failover to any supported target region, whether it supports availability zones or not, of your choice for DR and failback without any impact on the source region configuration," Talasila wrote.

ASR is available in all regions that support Availability Zones. In Europe, Germany Central, Germany, North, UK West, UK South, North Europe, West Europe, France Central and ...