Welcome to part 2 of this month’s Azure Partner Community blog series. Read part 1, and read previous posts.
 | by Jonathan Gardner |
Azure Site Recovery is a topic that I have previously covered on this blog and on community calls, and it is a popular topic in many conversations I have with partners. It’s a good time to provide you with an update and talk about some of the use cases for Azure Site Recovery.
- Addressing your top questions – Azure Site Recovery (March 2015)
- Focus on disaster recovery – Azure Recovery Services (October 2014)
- Watch the October 2014 Azure Partner Community call– Disaster recovery and high availability
Integration with SQL Server AlwaysOn
SQL AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances provide high availability through redundancy at the server-instance layer by working in conjunction with Windows Server Failover Clustering. Also built into SQL Server are AlwaysOn Availability Groups. These work in conjunction with AlwaysOn Failover Clustering to allow for provide maximum availability of a set of user databases that failover together.
In its latest release, Azure Site Recovery provides native support for SQL AlwaysOn. SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups can now be added to ASR recovery plans. This is an important addition for clients working to ensure streamlined failover of their applications. With the native integration it is no longer necessary to write and manage scripts to initiate the failover of a SQL AlwaysOn Availability Group.
Read the announcement about this update
Azure Pack update
Azure Pack has been adopted by many of our partners. Those using it are continually looking for a good way to provide disaster recovery. While we have included the ability to use Site Recovery with Azure Pack in previous releases it had some limited functionality in complex management environments. With the latest release, we have worked to increase support for scenarios where there are both single and multiple SCVMM instances. The ability to support these environments will help reduce the management costs for service providers.
Read the announcement about this update
Migrate from Amazon with Azure Site Recovery
One of the challenges of making the move from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure is the complexity of the migration. Enter Azure Site Recovery. Using Site Recovery as a migration tool is not limited to AWS. If you are interested in migrating servers from on-premises to Azure, Site Recovery can be a great tool for you. It even comes with a free one-month trial in the event that you want to use it that way.
The image below outlines the migration process to Azure when using Site Recovery.
This update to Azure Site Recovery is part of our hybrid cloud story. Site Recovery supports the ability to run VMs on AWS and create a DR location in Azure. I personally think it makes more sense to simply move them to Azure (shameless plug), but it can be done.
Read the announcement about this update
Additional resources
- Azure Site Recovery enables one-click orchestrated failover of VMs to Azure
- Azure Partner Readiness Catalog
Join the November 19 Azure Partner Community call
On the next community call, we’re going to take a look at the new Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics.
