Understanding Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a Microsoft hosted service available in most Azure regions that helps organizations enable disaster recovery and business continuity between one or more on-premises sites, an on-premises site and Azure, or two Azure regions. The service could prove useful for organizations lacking a good site-to-site disaster recovery, or lacking a secondary site entirely. ASR is intended to be used with physical servers and VMs running certain workloads, so organizations will need to do a level of planning, testing, and deployment work to ensure the service will meet their requirements.

Disaster Recovery as a Service

ASR offers disaster recovery for the VMs or physical servers at one site by replicating disks to a secondary site or to Azure VMs. When the primary site suffers an outage (such as catastrophic loss of a data center), the organization can fail over to the secondary site and quickly bring up the system using the replicated disks. Failover operations do not occur automatically; in the current form, ASR requires an administrator to initiate failover.