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Hyper-V failover with Azure Site Recovery

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Article from ADMIN 80/2024

By Christian Schulenburg

Back up Hyper-V with Azure Site Recovery and prepare for failover.

In many cases corporate IT is set up as virtual environments, which makes it all the more important to have recovery strategies in place for the IT landscape in the event of a disaster. Recovery is all about strategies and actions that help restore IT systems after a catastrophic event – be it a natural disaster, a hardware failure, or a cyberattack. The aim is to minimize data loss and get the services up and running as quickly as possible.

Hyper-V is Microsoft's server virtualization product that lets you run multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical host. Because VMs often host critical business applications and data, fast and reliable recovery after a disaster is crucial.

Microsoft Azure is a robust and scalable cloud platform ideal for disaster recovery scenarios, especially in combination with Hyper-V or other hypervisors. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is Microsoft's disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Thanks to ASR, companies can replicate their Hyper-V VMs in Azure and restore them as needed, ensuring a seamless transition in the event of an emergency and enabling companies to ramp up their resources quickly in the cloud.

For this article, I used Hyper-V to set up a virtual server on Windows Server 2019 and replicated it with an Azure subscription. An existing Azure environment was used in this case; however, you can also take out a free Azure subscription [1] and get started with an initial credit of $200.

Preparing the Azure Environment

Setting up ASR for Hyper-V is a multistep process and starts on the Azure side. The login account in Azure must be able to create a VM in the selected resource group and on the selected virtual network. To do this, the account requires the Virtual Machine Contributor and Site Recovery Contributor roles to manage the recovery processes. You should work as the

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