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Microsoft Azure Site Recovery – Replicating Hyper-V VMs to Microsoft Azure

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Have you ever wished that you could take your virtual machines (VMs) and replicate them to a cloud service for disaster recovery purposes? Now you can with Microsoft Azure Site Recovery!

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides the capability to replicate Hyper-V VMs directly to Azure for recovery purposes.

There are two types of recovery that can be configured:

  • On-premises to Azure protection—Replicate on-premise virtual machines located on Hyper-V host servers in VMM clouds to Azure. You configure and enable protection settings in Azure Site Recovery vaults. Virtual machine data is replicated from the on-premises Hyper-V server to Azure storage.

  • On-premises to on-premises protection—Replicate virtual machines located on Hyper-V host servers in VMM clouds from one on-premises site to another. You configure and enable protection settings in Azure Site Recovery vaults. Virtual machine data is replicated from one on-premises Hyper-V server to another. Azure Site Recovery simply orchestrates the process. Learn about this scenario in Getting Started with Azure Site Recovery: On-Premises to On-Premises Protection.

    Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/hyper-v-recovery-manager-azure/

Read more about ASR here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/hyper-v-recovery-manager-azure/

 

AZURE SITE RECOVERY WALK-THROUGH

The following walks through how to use Azure to store and recover VM replicas. This service was formerly called Hyper-V Recovery Services and has been renamed to Azure Recovery Services.

System Requirements

  • An Azure Subscription
  • Management certificate
  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2
  • Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V – used as VM host
  • Gen 1, fixed disk .vhd VMs in Hyper-V
  • Guest OS Windows Server 2008 or later

More details on requirements and planning are located here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn469074.aspx

Azure Site Recovery

If you haven’t used Azure Site Recovery (formerly Hyper-V Recovery Manager) from the Azure portal we’ll need to create a new Site Recovery Vault:

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After the vault is created select it from the page:

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From the drop-down on the main page, select “Between an on-premises site and Microsoft Azure”

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Select DASHBOARD and install Hyper-V ASR agent on Hyper-V hosts and ASR Provider on the VMM server:

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View of agent install wizard:

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Once the agents are installed, in the Azure portal under RECOVERY SERVICES, select PROTECTED ITEMS and a CLOUD to protect.

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Select “CONFIGURE PROTECTION SETTINGS”

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Select a TARGET, there are two options VMM or Microsoft Azure, for the purposes of this post I’m selecting Microsoft Azure:

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Select the options that best suits your recovery requirements and save:

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The following will be displayed:

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Once configuration is completed, we need to add virtual machines. Select clip_image021 and select a VM to protect:

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Select the check mark and the initial replication will begin (depends on the setting previously configured for replication start time).

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Here are the source and target properties, we can change the name and size of Azure VM. For example I added “-Azure” to the name (storage and network may also be configured as well):

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Other tasks to complete are createing maps to networks, e.g. a subent that is part of either an Azure ExpressRoute connection or an Azure Site-to-Site VPN. If recovery occurs the VM will be accessable as it would if it were within your own datacenter (network mapping is not a requirement to use Azure Site Recovery).

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The replication process will automatically enable Hyper-V recovery for the VM in System Center Virtual Machine Manager:

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Once the VM is protected we can either FAILOVER the VM or TEST FAILOVER for a VM:

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I chose to test a failover by selecting TEST FAILOVER. I’m also going to keep it isolated by not connecting the VM to a network:

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Once the failover of the VM completed we can log onto the VM and run tests:

Note: If you want to RDP into the VM after failover occurs, you’ll need to open up port 3389 under ENDPOINTS.

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I’m connecting to the test replica VM using RDP:

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Type in my credentials:

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I’ve successfully logged into the test VM:

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I can run my tests and complete the test by selecting COMPLETE TEST and typing in some notes:

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The environment will now be cleaned up by removing the test VM from Azure:

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FAILING OVER A VIRTUAL MACHINE

Now I’m going to failover a VM to Azure. On the virtual machines page select FAILOVER:

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Select Planned Failover or Unplanned Failover:

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For the purposes of this post I’m selecting Unplanned Failover.

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The job will sync data, pause the VM in Virtual Machine Manager and start a new instance of the VM in Azure:

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RECOVERY PLANS

I walked through manually managing Azure Site Recovery, however recovery can be automated by creating Recovery Plans.

Select RECOVERY PLANS at the top of the page:

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Specify the recovery plan parameters:

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Select the VMs to include in the recovery plan and select the check mark to complete:

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A recovery plan is going to run a sequence of actions defined by you to recover a VM either in Azure or to another data center such as a DR site.

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SUMMARY

I’ve walked through creating a site recovery vault, configured Azure Site Recovery from datacenter to Azure, tested and failed over a virtual machine to Azure, and looked at recovery plans for automating VM recovery in Azure.

Azure Site Recovery is a unique offering from Microsoft and I encourage you to start planning your disaster recovery site within Azure today!

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Azure Site Recovery Planning and Deployment Guides: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn440569.aspx

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hi Jose, yes documentation is located here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn788903.aspx
  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hi Klaus, currently Azure only supports Gen 1 .vhd format. We continue to bring this type of feedback to the the Azure team and I encourage everyone to post their feature requests here:http://feedback.azure.com/. The Azure team monitors and typically reply's to requests and comments.
  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Is it possible to use NVGRE inside Azure? I mean, is there a solution working with the SAME IP Addresses inside the VMs after Failover? Thanks, B.
  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks for the article. What are the plans for customers which are already running their VMs as a Generation 2 machine and want to use the feature? As far as I tested it its currently only possible to do this with G1 machines.
  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks for your reply. I already found a good voting for Gen 2 support which i would like to share here:http://feedback.azure.com/forums/256299-site-recovery/suggestions/6085722-protection-for-generation-2-virtual-machines
  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2014
    Hi Courtenay, do you have a documentation reference for the networking map piece? I was writing the same article you just did, but since I have the lab connected to Azure through a VPN, I would like to be able to access my VM after failing-over through the internal network. However, my azure network is not available to be mapped. Any insights?
    Thank you,

    Jose Fehse