🔹 Feature: Azure Site Recovery
🔹 What It Does: Managed BCDR service that replicates VMs and physical servers between Azure regions, from on-prem to Azure, from Extended Zones to Azure, and even from AWS to Azure — with orchestrated failover, failback, and testing.
What Is It Giving You:
✅ Broad Source Support: Azure VMs (region-to-region), Azure Extended Zone VMs → Azure region, VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, Azure Stack VMs, Windows/Linux physical servers, and AWS Windows instances. Also supports on-premises-to-secondary-site replication (VMware, Hyper-V via SCVMM, physical) for the “not-yet-in-Azure” scenario.
✅ Continuous Replication for Azure & VMware VMs: Data streams continuously to the recovery location; no fixed replication interval to schedule around. For Hyper-V, replication frequency drops as low as 30 seconds — real RPOs, not “nightly backup” RPOs.
✅ High Churn Support — Up to 100 MB/s: Configure disaster recovery for I/O-intensive Azure VMs (busy SQL, transactional stores, telemetry pipelines) that used to exceed ASR’s replication limits.
✅ Application-Consistent Snapshots: Recovery points capture disk data, all data in memory, and in-flight transactions — not just crash-consistent snapshots. Applications come back in a state they can actually resume from.
✅ Recovery Plans With Runbooks: Group multi-tier apps into a recovery plan, sequence failover steps, and inject Azure Automation runbooks or manual actions between them. Multi-VM apps fail over in the right order, with the right pre/post work, every time.
✅ Non-Disruptive DR Drills: Run failover tests to isolated test networks without affecting ongoing replication or production. Compliance-grade DR proof, on a schedule, without risk.
✅ Planned + Unplanned Failovers, Then Failback: Zero-data-loss planned failovers for expected outages (patching, migrations), minimal-loss unplanned failovers for real incidents, and simple failback when the primary is healthy again.
✅ Shared Disk / Failover Cluster Support: Protect Windows Server Failover Clusters running on Azure VMs — SQL FCI, SAP ASCS, Scale-out File Servers — including replication, failover, and re-protect for shared-disk workloads.
✅ Network Integration: Reserve IP addresses, configure load balancers, and wire Azure Traffic Manager into the failover path to keep DNS and traffic switchover automatic and quick.
✅ SQL Server Always On Native Support: Manage availability group failover as part of the same ASR recovery plans that orchestrate everything else.
✅ Azure Local Integration: Replicate Hyper-V VMs running on Azure Local clusters to Azure for hybrid infrastructure DR.
✅ Single Portal, Single Vault: Set up, manage, monitor, and test replication, failover, and failback from one Azure Recovery Services vault. No secondary datacenter to buy or maintain.
🌐 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/site-recovery-overview
