On-Premises Disaster Site Recovery Strategy with Azure VM

Site Recovery is very critical now a days. In your own Data-center or Server disasters can happen and you must secure your site to recover from them. Use Microsoft Azure to secure you on-premises machine today. Learn the failover and failback stages in Site Recovery on Azure. Learn Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategy in Azure.

Setup On-Premises Replication to Azure VM

Before even failover to Azure VM from on-premises machine make sure you have setup your replication to Azure VM.

Stages for On-Premises Disaster Recovery

After replication is setup to Azure VM follow this workflow to accomplish Site Recovery in 4 steps.

On-Premises Failover and failback four stages

Let’s learn all the 4 steps required for site recovery.

Stage 1: Fail over from on-premises

After setting up replication to Azure for on-premises machines, when your on-premises site goes down, you fail those machines over to Azure. After failover, Azure VMs are created from replicated data.

🛎️ Important action checklist table below to be followed before & after failover. Read them carefully.

Target Failover OS	Stage	Location to perform Actions	Actions
Windows Azure VM	Before Failover	On the On-Premise Machine	For Internet Access: make sure RDP is allowed for All Profiles, For site-to-site VPN access: make sure RDP is allowed for Domain and Private network. Make sure SAN ( Storage Area Network) policy is set to Online and There is no windows update pending on the VM.
Windows Azure VM	After Failover	On the Azure Virtual Machine	Add a public IP address, must allow incoming connections to the RDP port.
Linux Azure VM	Before Failover	On the On-Premise Machine	Ensure that the Secure Shell Service on the VM is set to start automatically on system boot. Check that firewall rules allow an SSH connection to it.
Linux Azure VM	After Failover	On the Azure Virtual Machine	Add a public IP address, Need to allow incoming connections to the SSH port.

Stage 2: Reprotect Azure VMs

In Azure, you reprotect the Azure VMs so that they start replicating back to the on-premises site. The on-premises VM (if available) is turned off during reprotection, to help ensure data consistency.

Stage 3: Fail over from Azure

When your on-premises site is running as normal again, you run another failover, this time to fail back Azure VMs to your on-premises site. You can fail back to the original location from which you failed over, or to an alternate location.

Stage 4: Reprotect on-premises machines

After failing back, again enable replication of the on-premises machines to Azure.

Overall Replication Steps Model Diagram

Learn more about BCDR strategy in Azure here.

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