The ability to recover your IAAS VMs in Azure to a different region has been a logical requirement within Azure for quite some time. Microsoft made the feature available in preview last year and this week have made it GA.

Azure DR allows you to recover your IAAS VMs in a different Azure region should their initial region become unavailable. For example, you run your workloads in North Europe, the region experiences significant downtime, you are now able to recover your workloads in West Europe.

In this post I will go through setting up an individual VM to replicate from North Europe to West. However, it’s worth pointing out that DR should be a business discussion, not just technical. All scenarios that could occur, within reason, should be discussed to decide whether DR is warranted. For example, if your business entirely relies on your premises for production, if you lose the premises, you don’t need DR as there is no production capability regardless of system recovery etc. The idea is to scope what DR actually means for your business and remember, DR is only valid if it is tested!

Enabling DR for a VM is straight forward. Open your VM blade and scroll down to Operations, you will see an option for Disaster Recovery

You select a Target Region that must be different from your current region, you can then choose the default settings for a POC. In my screen shot, I have created a Resource Group and Recovery Services Vault in WE already so will use those. Once submitted, replication for your VM will be enabled. You can then view the configured options:

And that’s it! Once synchronisation completes, you now have your VM protected in a different region. However, for it to be valid, you need to design and confirm your Recovery Plan then complete both a Test Failover and Complete Failover and Failback.

More reading on the overall concept and Azure-Azure DR specifics here.