Protecting a standalone VM against both zonal and regional failure.

Dan 176 Reputation points
2020-07-07T06:46:39.67+00:00

Hi,

I am currently looking into our BCDR planning and looking at how to best protect an individual VM where it is not possible to have multiple VMs.

I am planning on using ASR to replicate to another region but I am also looking into the possibility of a zonal failure.

One thought is that we could have subnets dedicated to a zone and then pin all individual VMs to this subnet and zone, this would then allow us to route all traffic for this subnet to a second region if a zone were to fail, this would only require replication to the second region.

I can't find any references to this approach anywhere, so I'm wondering if there is a better way to achieve this, or if there are any drawbacks of pinning a VM to a zone when it is standalone.

Thanks!

Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery
An Azure native disaster recovery service. Previously known as Microsoft Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager.
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  1. Leon Laude 85,716 Reputation points
    2020-07-07T09:20:13.16+00:00

    Hi,

    You can configure Availability Zones for your VMs, availability zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region:
    https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/azure/availability-zones/az-overview

    To protect an Azure VM from a regional failure, you can indeed use Azure Site Recovery:

    Quickstart: Set up disaster recovery to a secondary Azure region for an Azure VM
    https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/azure-to-azure-quickstart

    For more information about high availability alternatives for your Azure VMs, you can read more here:

    Availability options for virtual machines in Azure
    https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/availability

    Best regards,
    Leon

  2. SadiqhAhmed-MSFT 40,446 Reputation points Microsoft Employee
    2020-07-07T16:19:28.753+00:00

    @probi Replication and failover from region 1, zone 1 to region 2 is supported. You can then failback from region 2 to region 1, zone 1.

    I don’t think VNets are zone-aware, and therefore cannot be pinned to a specific Zone. As for re-routing traffic to a different region, that’s where something like Traffic Manager could be used.

    Please do not forget to "Accept the answer" wherever the information provided helps you to help others in the community.