When it comes to Disaster recovery solutions, most of the time we select a different physical site as a backup/replication target. This is because if the primary site is down, we still have a copy of data safe on different site. We also can do the same with Azure VM. By using Azure Site Recovery Service, we can simply replicate existing Azure VM to a secondary Azure Region.
Let’s go ahead and see how we can do this.
For the configuration process, I will be using PowerShell as well as GUI. Therefore, please make sure you have an Azure PowerShell module installed. More info about it can find under https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/azure/install-az-ps?view=azps-3.8.0
Create an Azure VM to use as Source
I like to begin the configuration process by creating a Test VM. To do that,
1. Launch PowerShell console and connect to Azure using Connect-AzAccount
2. Then create a new resource group using,
New-AzResourceGroup -Name REBELRG1 -Location “East US”
In the above, REBELRG1 is the resource group name and its created-in East US Azure region.
3. The next step is to create a new virtual network under REBELRG1 resource group.
$vmsubnet = New-AzVirtualNetworkSubnetConfig -Name vmsubnet -AddressPrefix “10.0.2.0/24”
New-AzVirtualNetwork -Name REBELVN1 -ResourceGroupName REBELRG1 -Location “East US” -AddressPrefix “10.0.0.0/16” -Subnet $vmsubnet
In the above, REBELVN1 is the new virtual network name. It has 10.0.0.0/16 address space. It also has a new subnet 10.0.2.0/24 (vmsubnet) for virtual machines.
4. As the next step of the configuration, I am going to create a new virtual machine under REBELRG1 resource group. This will be used for testing purposes.
$mylogin = Get-Credential
New-AzVm -ResourceGroupName REBELRG1 -Name “REBELTVM01” -Location “East US” -VirtualNetworkName “REBELVN1” -SubnetName “vmsubnet” -addressprefix 10.0.2.0/24 -PublicIpAddressName “REBELVM01IP1” -OpenPorts 3389 -Image win2019datacenter -Size Standard_D2s_v3 -Credential $mylogin
In the above, I am creating a virtual machine called REBELTVM01 in East US Azure region. It is running windows server 2019 data center edition. I have specified it using -Image parameter. It also using Standard_D2s_v3 vm size. For networking, it uses REBELVN1 virtual network and subnet 10.0.2.0/24.
5. Then I log in to the VM and created a folder and a file to use later for testing.
New-Item -Path ‘C:\REBELTest’ -ItemType Directory
New-Item -Path ‘C:\REBELTest\Test1.txt’ -ItemType File
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