Configure a Recovery Plan- Understanding Disaster Recovery

For the purpose of failover, a recovery plan gathers machines into recovery groups and helps define the recovery process. The recovery plan will determine how the machines failover and the order in which they start after failover. Recovery plans can be used for both failover to and failback.

To create a recovery plan, perform the following:

1. Sign into the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com.
2. Search for and select Recovery Services Vault.
3. In the Recovery Services Vault, select Recovery Plans (Site Recovery), and then select +Recovery Plan.
4. In Create Recovery Plan, enter a name for the plan.
5. Choose a source and target based on the machines in the plan, and then select Resource Manager for the deployment model.

Table 17.3 shows the failover, source, and target information for a recovery plan.

TABLE 17.3 Failover source and target

Failover	Source	Target
Azure to Azure	Select the Azure region	Select the Azure region
VMware to Azure	Select the configuration server	Select Azure
Physical machines to Azure	Select the configuration server	Select Azure
Hyper- V to Azure	Select the Hyper- V site name	Select Azure
Hyper- V (managed by VMM) to Azure	Select the VMM server	Select Azure

6. In Select Items Virtual Machines, select the machines (or replication group) that you want to add to the plan. Then click OK.

7. When done, click OK again to create the plan.

To add a group to a recovery plan, perform the following:

1. In Recovery Plans, right- click the plan and select Customize. By default, after creating a plan all the added machines are located in default Group 1.
2. Click +Group. By default, a new group is numbered in the order in which it is added. You can have up to seven groups.
3. Select the machine you want to move to the new group, click Change Group, and then select the new group. You can also right- click the group name and select Protected Item, and then add machines to the group. A machine or replication group can only belong to one group in a recovery plan.

Configure Site Recovery for Azure Virtual Machines

To set up site recovery for Azure VMs, there are a number of steps. I have covered most of these throughout this chapter. The steps include:

■     Verify Azure settings and permissions.

■      Prepare VMs you want to replicate.

■     Create a Recovery Services Vault.

■     Enable Site Recovery.

■     Enable VM replication.

To enable site recovery, in the vault settings, select Enable Site Recovery, as shown in Figure 17.44.

The next step in enabling Site Recovery for an Azure VM is to enable replication.

Enabling replication has several steps that include:

■     Selecting source settings

^■     Selecting the VMs

■      Reviewing the replication settings

■      Managing the replication policy

■     Reviewing the VM settings

I will be covering each of these, starting with selecting the source.