Azure Site Recovery

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Rob Waggoner

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I’ve had the opportunity to review and deploy Azure Site Recovery (ASR) and I’m really please at what I’ve found.  What does it do for me?  Think of it as Hyper-V Replica to Azure.  We have the ability to send the Hyper-V replicas to Azure and even start them up in Azure if we need to.  We can start them in either a test mode, similar to test failover in Hyper-V Replica, or we can failover the VM(s) and run them in Azure. 

Now that we understand the capabilities Azure Site Recovery can offer, how do we price out a solution for our customers?

Here’s what you need:

  1. Of course you will need an Azure subscription.
  2. You will need your on-premises VM(s) you plan to protect.
  3. You will need System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) installed on-premises. 
  4. You will need to setup and configure a Site Recovery Vault in Azure.

I agree that System Center is not a common scenario in SMB, but System Center and Azure Site Recovery are still more resilient and less expensive than building out a new DR site. 

Please note that while the System Center licensing means that you will purchase all of the System Center components, SCVMM is the only component that must be deployed, and its deployment is very straight forward.  Once SCVMM is deployed, you just connect SCVMM to your Azure Site Recovery Vault and identify the VMs you want to protect. 

The Pricing Calculator is here, please check the current pricing of the solutions, but as of this posting,  the Azure costs are:

  • The Azure preview price is $27.00 per VM, retail price is $54.00 per VM protected to Azure.  This cost includes up to 100GB of storage for VM storage and 1 Million Storage transactions for the replica.
  • If your VM exceeds 100GB of storage, additional storage pricing is based on actual consumption and can be estimated using the Azure Storage Calculator.  Azure Site Recovery uses Page Blob Geo Redundant Storage.  An additional 200GB of storage would cost $19 / month.

Some competitive products also replicate to public clouds, including replicating to Azure, but typically they require a running VM (or VMs) for replication.  ASR does not require any running services other that the Site Recovery Vault, which is included in the ASR price..  I want to point this out because in the ASR model, you don’t incur any additional costs for these replicas unless they are turned on for test or failover.

ASR gives you a “good start” towards a DR solution, but deploying ASR alone does not provide a complete DR solution.  You will probably need to build out a Virtual Network in Azure if you are protecting multiple VMs, if they must communicate with each other in the event of a failover.  A Site-to-Site virtual network is not required to make any of this work, but may be useful if you want to build out a more seamless DR solution.  While the Virtual Network has no additional costs, the Azure gateway cost is about $1.20 / day if you need to deploy a Site-to-Site network.

Let me know what you think about this plan and if you have any questions.

Until next time,

Rob

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