[2] Azure Tips and Tricks: Recovery Service vaults across regions

Context:

You are managing multiple Azure VMs in 3 regions across the EU. Let's assume that you are using West Europe, North Europe, and UK West.

Problem:

Initially, the critical systems were running in UK West, a Recovery Service Vault was created in North Europe and configured.

In the next 3 months, the critical application will need to run across all 3 regions. One of the requests is to ensure that the same backup and configuration policy is enforced across all regions.

Solution:

Most of the people would try to use the same instance of Recovery Vault from UK West regions across all regions. Unfortunately, this is not possible, a vault can be used only for resources from the same region.

When you use a Recovery Vault all data and configuration information for each VM is copied and stored inside the vault. A vault is created for specific Regions for which you want to protect and ensure that you have a DR plan.

Behind the scene, when you enable a DR for a VM, the Site Recovery Mobility extension is deployed to the VM and the VM is added to Azure Site Recovery. From there, the data is automatically copied in cache storage in the source region. From there the data is pushed to the target region where multiple recovery points are created and ready to be used in the case of a DR. The target region will use the last recovery point available for each VM.

In our case, you need to configure a new instance of Recovery Vault in each region. Even if this might sound like a lot of extra work, things are much simpler. If you already using Resource Manager (ARM) and automation, you would be able to reuse the UK West configuration for other regions, with just small changes in the parameters. Don't forget to activate Site Recovery and enable replication for the given VMs.

Additional to it, for critical application it is important to so resource reservation to ensure that in a case of a disaster you have computation and storage resources that can be used to host and run your Azure VMs.

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