Server Migration with Azure Site Recovery

Although it is largely recognized as a tool for disaster recovery and business continuity, Server Migration with Azure Site Recovery is a simple, resiliant and reliable way to move servers and workloads between almost any type of infrastructure. You can migrate servers, VMs and workloads to and from Azure, AWS, VMware, and many other smaller cloud providers. IN this tech talk Cloud Solutions Engineer Miguel Escalante discusses the methods to quickly set up and migrate servers with ASR.

Any Workload

Any server based workload can be backed up and recovered on another machine, virtual or physical. This supports Linux and Windows servers and can also be used to move servers between cloud subscriptions. ASR also supports versions all the way back to Windows Server 2003.

Ease of Setup

ASR is designed for easy and fast results, foregoing complicated and convoluted set up processes to reduce possibility for errors. Additionally, you can selectively choose which drives, VMs, and workloads you migrate.

Fast Turnaround

Azure Site Recovery can be configured and up and running in under 30 minutes depending on bandwidth and skill level.

Application Consistency

Applications remain intact, and can quickly be brought back online with minimal downtime.

Migrate from Multiple Environments

Migrate from Hyper-V, physical, Azure, and Amazon Web Services.

No-Impact Migration Testing

When replicating workloads into Azure, you can execute tests to ensure readiness.

Move application with near-zero down time

Move a single application of an entire data center to the cloud with minimal impact to production users.

No Licensing Fee

No site recovery charges for migration (first 31 days). While you will be charged compute costs if you spin up the instances, during the fail-over process there are no charges.

Hybrid Use Benefit

Move windows server licenses covered under software assurance to Azure for substantial savings. (Bring Your Own License)

Performing Server Migration with ASR

Jump to Demo

1. Prepare on-premise infrastructure
   1. Begin by creating a vault. The vault is the seat of all operations, and you can have as many vaults as you want. It is suggested to have a vault for each physical location. Best practice is to assure that your vault’s cloud location is as close to the physical machines as possible.
   2. Create a Policy. Decide what backup frequency you want, what timeouts to use.
   3. Prepare infrastructure. From your Recovery Service Vault overviews, select the site recovery option, then the first tab, Prepare Infrastructure. ASR provides a five step checklist for preparing your infrastructure.
      1. Setting your Protection Goal
      2. Deployment Planning, on the drop down, Have Your Completed deployment planning, you can select I will do it later, but you are likely to wind up with over-sized VM since the settings will be automatically determined.
      3. Prepare Source. You begin by creating a Hyper-V site. Once you create the site, you need to add a server. You can download a software install to create a configuration file for the server to migrate. There is a 72 hour window to complete this step, as the security key provided will expire.
      4. Select Target. Here you will select your Azure subscription and  your deployment model.
      5. Create your replication policy.
2. Replicate application - In this stage, you again get a hierarchical checklist
   1. Configure source
   2. Configure Target
   3. Select virtual machines
   4. Configure properties (This is where you select what you want to migrate.
   5. Configure replication settings (you can go back and reconfigure these later)
3. Manage recovery plan, perform test fail-over, perform fail-over to recover application in Azure.
   1. At this point, there is technically no VM, the recovery, policies, source target and other settings are simply waiting.
   2. Prior to performing fail over, you will want to perform a failover test to assure your configurations are all correct.
   3. Finally, to once you have completed the failover tests and are assured that your configuration is correct, you can perform a fail over to complete your migration.

AgileDatacenter provides fixed-price migration and management services for servers, workloads and applications in Azure and AWS. We are a 4x Microsoft partner of the year and a certified AWS partner. Click here for a free quote on cloud migration services.

About Agile IT Tech Talks

Agile IT Tech Talks are weekly sessions where we bring in subject matter experts for short, highly focused educational segments, followed by up to an hour of open Q&A where Agile IT clients can discuss their own environments with our engineers and a group of peers. While we release the demos and sessions on our blog, the Q&A benefit is only available to Agile IT Managed Service and Cloud Service Customers. Agile IT is a four time cloud partner of the year and offers fully managed security as a service. To find out more, schedule a free call with a cloud service advisor.