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Business continuity management

Continuity Guaranteed

Article from ADMIN 30/2015

By Michel Lüscher , By Florian Frommherz

We take a look at the new business continuity service from Azure and show how to use it.

Azure Site Recovery is designed to help enterprises protect critical applications by coordinating the replication and restore process for physical or virtual computers. The service gives administrators the ability to use their own data center, a hosting service provider, or Azure as the replication location. This saves costs and overhead for setting up and managing a secondary site. Environments can be protected by policy-based replication of virtual machines.

Azure Site Recovery coordinates and manages ongoing replication of data by integrating existing technologies such as Hyper-V Replica, System Center, and SQL Server AlwaysOn. In this article, we show how the new business continuity service works and how to deploy it.

Creating good business continuity involves a fair amount of complexity; after all, the availability of the endpoints and maintaining productivity in case of failure are at stake. Business Continuity Management (BCM) can be simplified in various ways through the use of virtual machines. Whether this means creating and backing up different snapshots of a virtual machine or its operating system through the use of checkpoint technology or simply moving a virtual machine between virtualization hosts, all of these different functions add their own level of complexity. For example, how can you ensure that the virtual servers wake up in the right order on a different host in a different data center? Moreover, how will the underlying network configuration, IP addresses, and DNS cope with this?

Simplifications in the form of system monitoring and intelligence, in combination with automatic mechanisms, can be a relief. Since the release of Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft has offered a cloud service for BCM under the name of "Hyper-V Recovery Manager." The first version covered the enterprise-to-enterprise (E2E) scenario by orchestrating a failover of virtual machines from one Hyper-V host/cluster to another. The current

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