hey friends you know whether you're
working for a large fortune 500
corporation or a small business you
probably want to protect your
applications from downtime
sid hearth is here to show me how azure
site recovery can help you recover your
applications
in the event of natural or man-made
disasters by leveraging availability
zones within an azure region
today on azure friday
hey friends i'm scott hanselman and it's
azure friday we're talking with sidharth
here
who's going to talk to me about azure
site recovery how are you
i'm good how are you scott i'm living
the dream and learning about azure
i'm excited to keep my sights up you
know i'm always concerned with
disasters can happen it could be a
natural disaster like something bad
or i could just trip over a wire and
mess something up
literally i had a disaster today where
the power went out in my city
in the middle of a workshop that i was
giving but fortunately i had a ups
and my computer and my internet kept
running and the client was so impressed
that i had disaster recovery
even though it's just a little battery
under my desk
that is very cool yeah business
continuity and disaster recovery is
super important right and especially
when it comes to mission critical
applications
you want to make sure uh that you have a
sound
business continuity and disaster
recovery strategy and azure site
recovery
really helps you strengthen that bcdr
strategy by helping you uh recover your
applications
in the event of a planned or unplanned
outage
so if you're doing a disaster recovery
drill of sorts uh
then azure site recovery can help you
fail over
your vms uh and then fail them back once
your drill is complete
uh but god forbid there's an audition
that could be a natural disaster
or a man-made uh outage right there
might be a rogue admin who might
like you said trip or wire somewhere uh
for those kinds of situations as well
azure site recovery can help you fail
over
your applications from one site to
another and then fail back
to your original site once the outage
has passed
now i'm used to thinking about websites
where you do a ping
or you have a health check where you
make an http call
and then you have to make a decision
about what unhealthy is
but with with virtual machines and with
more sophisticated sites that aren't
just
my blog how do you decide that it's a
disaster
as opposed to a hiccup yeah great
question
so uh what most customers tend to notice
is uh their applications malfunctioning
right so if
they are unable to use their
applications uh and and they
notice errors then that's a clear signal
that something's wrong right
uh now if these uh virtual machines that
are hosting the application happen to be
in azure uh then azure communications
actually sends out an email
uh to to you as a user which
clearly communicates that azure is
facing an outage and then
uh encourages you to look at your
disaster recovery plan
and then if you as a user believe that
it is in your best interests to actually
perform a disaster recovery then azure
site recovery helps you to
go ahead and do that interesting and
this isn't necessarily a cloud
only situation right i might have a
physical machine in my office
and then i want i have a backup in the
cloud and i could fail up to the cloud
yeah so let me actually share my screen
at this point
yeah okay so azure site recovery is a
complete disaster recovery solution
right and
it applies uh whether you are in a
on-prem environment or in azure right
so if you're on prem you could have
physical servers on prem
and you could replicate those into azure
uh you may be a vmware or a hyper-v shop
and if you have those vms uh you can
replicate those into azure as well
uh and recently we've started supporting
azure stack so if you have azure stack
vms uh those can be replicated as well
and the cool thing is you can fail these
over into azure
uh and then once the outage passes or
once you're comfortable with your dr
drill and you want to fail back
you can fail back to your vmware or
hyper-v environment
now a couple of years ago we launched
region to region dr
and and what that means is if you're
running your vms on azure already
say you're located in north europe and
you're running your vms
from the north europe region you can
actually replicate
to west europe or uk south or any one of
the regions in europe and
you can fail over to that region and
then fail back to north europe
uh anytime you want so that's a really
cool offering and it's
quickly become one of our most
highly adopted uh scenarios right um so
we do this for on-prem uh machines
whether they be physical servers or
virtual machines we do these for azure
virtual machines as well
and we support all operating systems so
this is not just a a windows offering
we have first class linux support
regardless of uh the distribution you're
using right whether that be
ubuntu or debian or red hat what have
you uh we support them all
but what i really want to talk about
today is uh
our newest offering uh we we did a
preview of this at ignite last year and
then we
went to ga a few months ago and that's
his zone to zone dr
so availability zones i remember that if
i can tell
if i have a virtual machine and i say
hey azure make two virtual machines
uh they could randomly show up next to
each other they could be in the same
rack they could be near each other in
the same aisle
inside of this giant warehouse but by
giving them different availability zones
i'm telling azure
keep these away from each other put them
on other sides of the building
is that a way to think about
availability zones
yes exactly so within any region
we have three availability zones uh and
these are three separate data centers
right which which may be a few
miles or a few a couple of dozen miles
apart and
uh you can host your vms in each
availability zone so if you have two vms
you put the first vm in zone one
the second vm in zone three for example
uh then that way you ensure that they
are not in the same data center and
certainly not in the same rank
oh fantastic so that's really nice where
i can be in north europe and i'm not
following
falling over from north to west or to a
totally different country i'm just
failing
a couple of miles away exactly
very cool is this hard to set up is this
something that i would need to spend a
lot of time
uh no it's actually super easy to set up
uh let me actually show you how
so if i go to my browser here so i have
a
virtual machine that i have set up in in
southeast asia
and it's pinned to zone one as you can
see here
right now if i want to replicate this
virtual machine to a different
zone within southeast asia uh then all i
need to do is
uh under operations on the left-hand
side blade here i go to disaster
recovery
uh once i go to this plate it asks me
whether i want to fail over to a
different region
uh and so i i have different options
here uh
or it i can choose to fail over within
the same region right using zone to zone
so i say yes to disaster recovery
between availability zones
now what that does is it pins me to
southeast asia
and then i can go to advanced settings
and i can actually choose the zone that
i want to fail over to
so if you see availability uh as a field
here
uh then my source is in availability
zone one which i showed you in the
overview blade
uh but uh my target can be inaudibly
zone three or availability zone two
and i can choose those uh i can uh also
choose other fields so for example i can
fade over to a different subscription
uh i can fade over to a different
resource group uh i may choose to use
the same virtual network or a different
virtual network so i can
perform a number of different uh
configuration
changes here but i can just choose to
accept the defaults pick a different
availability zone
and then review and start replication
once i do that it
takes a few minutes for a replication to
be enabled
and for your vm to be protected now
every virtual machine is different every
application is different how do i
know that my users or whether they be
actual users
or whether they be clients that are
calling services on those
that they are addressing this do they
address it by ip address by dns name
how do i know when i failed over from
one to the other it is still
you know addressable great question
so once you actually protect your
virtual machine uh
while protecting it you can choose the
network you want to fail over to
the nice thing about zone two zone
replication or zone to zone disaster
recovery
is that uh you can reuse some of the
networking components so you can reuse
the same ip address
for your uh secondary virtual machine
all right and so you do not need to
reconfigure uh your private ip addresses
you can just pick and use the same ones
that you were using earlier
and this is a big benefit of zone to
zone disaster recovery versus region to
region disaster recovery
where you really have to set up all the
networking in a lot of cases our
customers have
complicated networking uh setups and uh
many a times they don't want to
replicate the same complicated
networking
across different regions and for those
types of customers zone to zone uh
disaster recovery is actually a great
choice
because you literally don't have to uh
change anything
with with the networking uh it just
works
that's fantastic the last question i
have is uh
where are we thinking about storage some
virtual machines store on their local
vhd
some talk to cosmos db some talk to sql
server
if you fail over and then fail back how
do you make sure you have data integrity
great question so we actually create a
replica disk
in the target availability zone right so
we actually
create a disk which is of this same or
if you want to choose a different type
of disk you can choose a different type
of disk but we try to maintain the same
disk configuration and we replicate to a
different disk
in the target zone and so once you fail
over
we actually spin up a virtual machine
for you in the target availability zone
and attach
uh that disk that you were replicating
to oh that's fantastic that's brilliant
so if i can just uh go ahead and show
you what uh
it looks like to have a protected vm so
if i go ahead and
click on review and start replication
here here i can see a quick
summary uh of of of my vault uh of of my
automation account and and uh
i can choose to change any of these now
for the purposes of this
demo i'm just going to choose the and
accept the defaults and i'm going to
start replication
once i start replication in a few
minutes uh my vm gets protected and
here i have a second vm uh that that i
have already protected and let me show
you what a protected vm looks like
so when i go to the disaster recovery
blade i can see that the
vm happens to be protected uh the
replication health
is is healthy which means that we are
actually replicating in
real time so any churn uh any ios that
are happening on your
source virtual machine in your primary
availability zone
are faithfully replicated into your
target availability zone in real time
uh you also see the recovery point
objective here which is really
really cool right so you have a recovery
point objective here of of
a few seconds uh and and that's really
powerful
uh for customers who can't stand any
data loss right recovery point objective
is really a
a measure of the data loss that you
might
see in the event of an outage and in
this case you can see that you you'll
probably
lose about 34 seconds worth of data
in the event of uh of an outage as soon
as you click failover okay
uh now in the event of a disaster uh
failing over is really easy so i can
just click on failover here
and then i can choose a recovery point
to fail over to
uh so that recovery point could go back
as far as
24 hours by default uh but we can go
back as far as 72 hours
um and and choose any recovery point so
we can fail over
to a point as far as 72 hours back in
history
now for most customers um they actually
prefer failing over to the latest point
right and that's what we choose as
default
uh and so if i go ahead and accept the
defaults here so the latest process
recovery point was
just a few moments ago right so i can
choose that and click ok
and my failover has begun now failover
takes
any anywhere between 20 to 30 minutes
our rto
sla is about two hours but really for
most customers
for well over 95 percent of vms we see
that that the rtos is
is a few minutes uh now let me show you
a failed over vm
right so this is a separate vm which uh
which i triggered a failover for
some time ago and let me show you what
that looks like so here i have a vm3
which is actually failed over
right and i actually failed over and
re-protected this back to primary so you
can see that i have reprotected it back
to my original
zone the status is protected the
replication health is healthy
and again i am ready to go and fail back
to my on premise and just to
show you where i am now uh with this uh
virtual machine you can see that i'm
actually in zone three
so i have failed over this virtual
machine from zone one to zone three
and all of this takes just a few minutes
could you again tell us the
acronyms rpo and rtl
sure so rpo refers to recovery point
objective
and the way to think about it is it is
in a measure of the data loss
that you might see in the event of an
outage right uh so typically the rpo
that you might see is is of a few
minutes so if you see an rpo of say
five minutes for example that means that
you are going to lose data
worth about five minutes uh in the event
of an outage
now rto which is recovery time objective
is actually a measure of
the time it takes to spin up your
application again
in the secondary data center so uh if
uh the rto is five minutes that means
that it's going to take five minutes
after you click on failover for your
application to become accessible
in the target region or the target zone
as the case may be
i see so there's the returning back to
live you know returning to live and
being ready to
to service uh users and then there's the
that moment of data loss so even though
you said it might take 10 minutes or 20
minutes there's a lot of work happening
underneath in the background to make
sure that you're shuttling data
replications and disks back and forth
exactly we actually spin up a vm uh so
your vm in the target zone is actually
not
up until you click on failover right and
that's a really cool functionality
because it uh drastically reduces the
total cost of operations of your
disaster recovery setup
you don't need to keep your compute
resources up and running at all times uh
only when you actually fail over do we
actually bring up uh
the compute resources in the target zone
or the target region as the case may be
wow this feels like something that
everyone should have
now is does this part of just running
virtual machines does everyone have this
uh does it cost to do recovery or is it
just part of the cost of a virtual
machine
uh no there is an additional cost on
this card so it's it's 25
per vm per month and
customers tend to use it for their
business critical applications so
really before they get to azure site
recovery
uh as as the tool of choice they
actually perform
a an audit of their environment and and
try to figure out which of their
applications are mission critical versus
which are not and for their mission
critical applications which cannot
tolerate any outage whatsoever
uh they choose azure site recovery as
the default disaster recovery solution
that's great and you said that uh
recovery
availability zone is a new feature that
is just recently out so that's new
separate from uh region to region
failover
that's right so we launched region to
region failover uh
in 2018 and and uh it is one of our most
popular scenarios so
uh customers can choose to actually fail
over between the regions uh using the
region to region dr
scenario uh but zone to zone a disaster
recovery is something that we launched
in june
earlier this year and and that's
available in in southeast asia and in uk
south uh the reason we actually launched
it is quite interesting squad so
uh in most of our geographies we have
region pairs right so if you look at any
uh large
uh azure region so for example if you
look at uk
you have two regions in in uk right uk
south and uk west uh or if you look at
france we have a couple of regions there
we have many regions in the u.s right uh
so most of our
uh jios are covered from a region pair
perspective but when it comes to
southeast asia which happens to be
singapore
uh singapore is actually a city state
which is which is not very uh
large right and so it's difficult to
house two regions
which are a few hundred miles away from
each other
inside of southeast asia uh and for
those type of customers
who who have just one region in in their
uh
in their geo and who who are concerned
about uh data residency
uh they often don't want to or are not
comfortable failing over
into a different region so for example
for southeast asia
which is singapore you may choose to
fail over to hong kong but a lot of our
financial services customers in
singapore
are not comfortable uh failing over to
hong kong because they have strict data
residency requirements and
legal compliance issues and therefore
they cannot move their data and their
applications outside
of singapore and so for those type of
customers zone to zone disaster recovery
is ideal
because that way you're actually
ensuring that your
data and your application never leaves
the regional boundary right it's
constrained to a particular region but
you're
also failing over between zones and so
you are covered from a disaster recovery
standpoint as well
very cool so where can folks go to learn
more about zoned zone disaster recovery
and see if it applies to what their
technology needs are sure so we actually
have
extensive documentation so if you go to
azure docs
you can read up on how to enable
azure vm disaster recovery between
availability zones
i just showed you the portal experience
but we also support powershell and we
have a rich set of
rest apis so customers can choose to use
those as well if they so choose and
all of that is documented in azure docs
fantastic well thank you so much for
chatting with me today
thanks scott it was great to be on your
show i am learning all about how to
protect my applications across
zones within the same region using azure
site recovery today
on azure friday hey thanks for watching
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