Microsoft has recently announced the ability of Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to set up Disaster Recovery (DR) for IaaS VMs using managed disks. This feature allows ASR to become an all-encompassing disaster recovery solution for applications hosted on IaaS VMs, including those hosted on VMs with managed disks.
Managed disks allow for storage management simplification as well as the durability and availability for disk usage. When virtual machines on managed disks are being protected, Azure Site Recovery creates a replica managed disk in the target region corresponding to each managed disk of the production VM in the primary region. The replica disk becomes the data store for the source disk in the primary region and helps to avoid the need of creating multiple storage accounts to store data for the protected machines.
Here is an example of a protecting computer-generated machine with five managed disks.
Fig 1: Protecting via the virtual machine experience
Fig 2: Protecting via the recovery services vault experience
This feature is deployed in all Azure production regions where ASR is supported. Microsoft is planning to roll out this capability to national clouds soon.
[su_note note_color=”#eeeeee” text_color=”#151212″]Suggested Reading: 5 Azure performance metrics every administrator should keep in mind[/su_note]