Organizations today are looking for seamless and cost-effective ways to migrate their on-premise workloads from private, virtualized environments onto a hybrid or public cloud. Before we venture into the details of Azure Site Recovery and the numerous benefits it offers, it is important to first understand why Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) is critical in today’s competitive market.
Research states that every organization, on an average is bound to experience some kind of a disruption; be it software and hardware failures, manual errors, power failures or other infrastructure and maintenance interruptions. These disruptions result in heavy costs, waste of time and effort as well as lowering the company’s reputation. More importantly, customers are likely to show more interest in companies that adhere to compliance metrics. Certification such as ISO, HIPPA, FedRamp is proof that an organization is qualified to ensure adequate protection and recovery measures for their applications and services.
Microsoft’s Azure Site Recovery (ASR) offers quick and simple recovery, cloud migration, and management of multiple environments including physical servers, AWS, Hyper-V and VMWare. This unified solution offers workload-aware disaster recovery and enables virtual and physical machines to run on the Azure public cloud to improve workload efficiency and Disaster Recovery (DR).
How ASR can help you manage VMWare workloads
A private cloud, VMware environment that is saturated may find it challenging to handle peak loads. If you are looking for a more efficient way to move VMWare workloads and associated configurations, back and forth in a hybrid cloud, ASR could be the answer. In fact, extending and protecting VMware workloads into Azure is a simple and automated process that works seamlessly with your existing infrastructure.ASR enables automated discovery of virtual machines being managed by VMware vCenter Server instances, including those running various different versions of Windows and Linux. It ensures that all of the tiers representing an application stack replicate consistently and failover simultaneously. It also offers automatic failback to the VMware infrastructure from Azure when the on-premise data center comes back online.
Replicating VMware private cloud and physical server workloads to Azure cloud for disaster recovery purposes offers several benefits. It sustains business continuity, orchestrates data replication, and monitors failover and recovery of virtual and physical machines. Shifting to Azure also protects critical applications running in your datacenter with flexible recovery plans and low RPOs/RTOs. Moreover, ASR facilitates DR drills and repetitive failover tests and helps scale up DR set-ups.
Benefit from a truly hybrid experience
ASR provides a truly hybrid experience by controlling where you run apps and store data and offers a scalable and reliable platform for both Tier 1 and Tier 2 workloads. You can move a single application or an entire data center with near-zero downtime and minimal impact on users. ASR supports application testing before migration by replicating production workloads. A one-time replication of application data is also sufficient to perform disaster recovery, migrate workloads, or create Dev/Test environments.
More importantly it will increase datacenter agility by allowing your organization to experience the almost limitless scalability offered by the cloud.
GAVS can help your organization utilize the best of Azure tools and best practices, coupled with the ITIL based principles to drive business outcomes.
Read more on GAVS ASR services.