Azure in 5 minutes: Azure Site Recovery (ASR) for VMware – Setup

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Rob Waggoner

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Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides a Disaster Recovery solution for companies of all sizes (including SMB) that cannot afford, or do not want, to maintain their own Disaster Recovery site.  With ASR, customers can leverage Azure as their Disaster Recovery site, and execute non-business impacting DR drills to ensure all of their workloads are replicating.  We originally deployed ASR for Hyper-V based VMs, and we have since deployed ASR solutions for Physical and VMware based workloads as well.  Originally, deploying ASR for VMware (or Physical) based workloads required two additional VMs running full time in Azure.  These two VMs were expensive to run and added to the complexity of the solution.  A few months ago, we released an update to ASR for VMware (and Physical) so it no longer requires the two VMs to be run in your Azure tenant.  The discussion below is based on the updated ASR for VMware solution.  The cost to protect an on-premises VMware based VM is basically $54.00 / workload / month plus the cost of the storage of the VM within Azure.  There are no runtime fees unless the VMs are started within Azure for test DR drills or for an actual failover into Azure. 

This article is a very good read.  It provides an excellent overview of the requirements of ASR for VMware workloads:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/site-recovery-vmware-to-azure/

Take note that your Process Server should have at least 600 GB of free space.  The Configuration and Process server installation will complete without 600 GB in free space, but you will need free space to adequately protect your on-premises VMs.  Since I put my Process Server in a VM, I created a thinly provisioned volume of 1 TB just for this purpose.

In this video, I will walk through the process to setup Azure Site Recovery for VMware based VMs. 

 

 

Here is the link to the Capacity Planning tool.  Please take time to review this tool to ensure you have adequate capacity to protect your workloads.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/site-recovery-capacity-planner/

In the video, I mentioned the CSPSConfigtool.exe tool.  This is the tool we used to setup the VMware and domain accounts on the Process Server. It is located in the [INSTALL LOCATION]\home\svsystems\bin folder.  For me, it was in the \ProgramData\ASR\home\svsystems\bin folder.

Please check out our whole series of Azure blogs & videos at https://azure.msts2.com

Until next time,

Rob

 

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