Azure Site Recovery Reviews

The main use case for Azure Site Recovery is for disaster recovery. Site Recovery has been in use for almost five to six years. We use these services for DR configuration and disaster recovery.

Replication happens when you have a primary site. The primary site will be replicated to the other side with minimal downtime. We can transfer the data from one region to another region when any disaster happens. That is the reason Microsoft provides us with a 99.95% SLA.

If you have a physical server in your city or country and any disaster happens, you have to switch from your primary to secondary site. If you have hardware, you also have to pay for cooling and resource charges. In Azure, nothing is there; you simply create the DR site, enable replication from primary to secondary. Whenever you require, you can do a quarterly, half-yearly, or monthly failover test as per your business or project requirement.

There is an option to install the agent, establish the communication from your on-premises to cloud, and you can use Azure Site Recovery as well. A major benefit is that you do not want to pay any more for huge costs to build a DR site. The secondary option is the Recovery Services Vault.

Recovery Services Vault will act the same, but there is no way to perform the DR drills. Recovery Services Vault only takes the backup of your virtual machines.

If you set up a physical device, you obviously have to purchase physical devices and resources, but here you only hire one administrator who can configure it without making any noise or taking support from multiple resources.

I am not sure about these improvements because I have been using these services for a long period. It is quite good, and I have not found any negative thoughts on that service.

Azure Speech services are part of the AI. Scalability is provided with 99.95% availability. The cost is cheaper compared to other DR services. Cloud services are very flexible and will save costs. One-time configuration is stable all the time.

Multiple savings are available, including time saving. When doing DR with physical servers, your resource should be available, and you should not face any power interruption or challenges. In Azure, we can access the services remotely, and we can do DR drills or these other things with minimal cost and resource allocation.

Point in time recovery is also a feature I am aware of. Cost savings are definitely present, though I am not aware of the exact percentage.

There is only one thing to note: the agent has to be up-to-date when SCCM or any third-party tools are doing patching activities. If their agent version is mismatched and the health status is critical, you will not be able to perform your Azure Site Recovery. Recently, I worked with a mass issue related to Recovery Services Vault, and the VM support engineers are taking a lot of time to extend support to the customer. When you raise a call, they wait too long, and even if you request an engineer to set up a call for severity B cases, they are not ready to communicate over the phone, preferring email instead.

I have been working with Azure for the past seven or eight years.

Scalability is provided because they are offering 99.95% availability. The cost is cheaper compared to other DR services. It is very flexible and will save your cost.

Microsoft support could be improved as it rates only a five out of ten, with slow response times and a preference for email over phone communication even in severity B cases.

For Azure Site Recovery, I would give an overall rating of nine.

Neutral

The setup is straightforward; however, you have to take support from your network side to configure your network communication and also support from the domain admin to configure the domain. When you perform the failover, you have to stop the services from the primary site. The application team has to validate and come back to you to confirm everything is up and working as usual.

A major advantage is that you do not want to pay any more for huge costs to build a DR site. It is very flexible and will save your cost.

Azure Speech service is not a very popular tool. If you are talking about private cloud, we have AVS, Azure VM solution, which is a different service.

If you have a physical server in your city or country and any disaster happens, you have to switch from your primary to secondary site. If you have hardware, you also have to pay for cooling and resource charges. In Azure, nothing is there; you simply create the DR site, enable replication from primary to secondary. Whenever you require, you can do a quarterly, half-yearly, or monthly failover test as per your business or project requirement.

There is a gap because when the disaster happens, you could not recover all the data. Therefore, RTO and RPO come into the picture, which means there would be some breach where we cannot recover that data.

Overall rating: 9 out of 10.

Neutral

Neutral

We migrated around seventy on-prem servers to Azure via Site Recovery for one of our projects. We use it in our disaster recovery site, and we perform this process every three months.

Azure Site Recovery is obviously a time-saving solution, and I can write PowerShell scripts to automate failover on or off processes.

First of all, we initially faced a challenge as Azure Site Recovery was not supporting shared disk options on SQL clusters with VMs, which are important for a Windows cluster mode. 

Additionally, the setup is quite easy, only requiring the creation of a vault. Its time-saving aspects allow us to write PowerShell scripts to automate failover processes.

Currently, Azure Site Recovery does not support shared disk options. Moreover, it does not support services like AppConfig or App Services. Integrating these services would make the solution more accessible for any company.

I have been working on Azure since around eight years.

I would rate the stability of Azure Site Recovery at eight to nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Azure Site Recovery at seven or eight out of ten.

We primarily rely on our Cloud Support Partner for support. In case they are unable to assist, we then reach out to Microsoft. However, I personally do not have experience contacting Microsoft technical support.

Positive

Previously, when we had physical servers, we used VMware. In VMware, scalability and some other features are limited compared to Azure, which also offers zone redundancy and other advantages.

The initial setup is quite easy, involving creating a vault, and it does not take much time.

Azure Site Recovery is time-saving, and its features allow us to automate processes and save resources.

Its bit costly for long term use

I would recommend Azure Site Recovery to others. I rate it an eight to nine out of ten.

My main use case for Azure Site Recovery is that we are doing cross-region disaster recovery and processing.

It is the goto solution for building Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery for your business.

The features I find most valuable in Azure Site Recovery include the Test Failover, which allows us to test our site recovery without bringing down the primary; disaster recovery provides that feature.

Regarding real-time health monitoring dashboards, we create dashboards based on various metrics, and we create custom dashboards.

The flexibility of Azure Site Recovery regarding integration with different IT environments is limited; it is purely an Azure platform service for business continuity, not meant for integration with other services.

The point-in-time recovery feature is not useful as it is not within the scope of point-in-time recovery. We have RTO goals and RPO goals that we track live, which provide feedback on what the RTO and RPO are in case of failover.

Azure can improve Azure Site Recovery potentially because the internals are not clearly available; we take Azure support for some of these things, which is not adequately provided.

Functionality-wise, I am satisfied with the current services of Azure Site Recovery; the only thing I would mention is that the user experience can be improved.

I have been working with Azure Site Recovery for five years.

I would rate stability for the product as eight out of ten.

For scalability, it is fine and easy to set up; I would rate it as eight or nine.

For tech support, I would give them a rating of eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup for Azure Site Recovery is pretty simple.

Azure Site Recovery is suitable for global companies as it offers cross-region recovery.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Azure Site Recovery as seven out of ten.

When you have a large environment with applications and site databases structured in layers such as program, business layer, and database layer, it is crucial to have a secondary strategy in place. This involves running a secondary site in a different location, possibly in another country within the same region, ensuring continuity and enabling a robust disaster recovery plan to address any issues that may arise.

If you enable automated failover through the portal, in case of a disaster in your main site, you can create automation to move workloads and redirect traffic to another region. This ensures that you have a last line of defense for your secondary site in the event of any issues.

It can incorporate features related to monitoring the site to streamline the process. Personally, I often use automation for efficiency. This reduces dependency on support for those solutions, especially in scenarios involving disaster recovery. 

Currently, we lack a straightforward method to automate the restart of services, which can be quite time-consuming. Having more APIs would certainly enhance the security and manageability of these solutions.

I have been using Azure for six years. I am a consultant and helped many customers in the last few years to deliver and plan to recover solution.

Setting up Azure Site Recovery is straightforward, but even for the simplest services, having some prior experience can be beneficial to avoid unnecessary costs. If you're already familiar with Azure or other cloud providers, you'll understand the process better and can efficiently complete the setup without extra expenses.

The initial setup takes around four to five hours, depending on the volume of data being synced and the complexities of your network.

It's crucial to designate individuals responsible for different aspects of the implementation. You need someone who understands the business data and cares about its integrity. The data owner should be knowledgeable about SLAs and data objectives. Additionally, having someone experienced with networking and cloud services ensures a smoother deployment. For smaller environments needing replication for a few virtual machines or traffic redirection, having three dedicated resources like a business data owner, a networking expert, and a cloud services specialist should suffice.

Sometimes you only need to set up recovery cycles for one or two systems. However, in a large environment with hundreds or thousands of servers, replicating the entire setup in another region can be quite costly. It depends on your service needs and the specific solution you're implementing.

I rate the pricing a ten out of ten where ten is highest.

Azure Backup is popular because it's essential for many solutions; every solution needs a backup strategy. While backups are highly useful, disaster recovery is more commonly used by customers with existing knowledge or experience in cloud services.

Azure Site Recovery can be deployed in both environments: on-premises and in the cloud. To set up Azure Site Recovery on-premises, you install a small agent on your machines and configure it to replicate to Azure. Similarly, if you are already in a cloud environment like AWS and want to set up Azure Site Recovery, you install agents and configure the necessary infrastructure services in Azure to begin replication.

Before implementing Azure Site Recovery, it's crucial to understand more about your environment, such as resilience strategies and Azure's various locations, to ensure a well-planned deployment.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

In my company, I use the solution as a simple tool for backup and not for restoration purposes. My company is in the phase of conducting some simple and quick testing.

The ease of synchronization in Azure Site Recovery is a valuable feature. Azure Site Recovery's ability to ensure synchronization of VMs from on-premises to the cloud is something that Veeam doesn't do well, and it is one of the major factors that drove us towards the tool.

The product's performance is an area of concern where improvements are required. From an improvement perspective, the solution should provide ease of use to its users and try to be a complete solution to be able to act as a CDP replacement.

I have been using Azure Site Recovery for two years. I don't remember the version of the solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Veeam is one of the solutions my company uses. Azure Site Recovery is a tool that my company is considering as an option against Veeam.

The product's initial setup phase was straightforward.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model or in the cloud. There are some components in the on-premises part, but the tool is mostly in the cloud.

I have seen a return on investment from the use of Azure Site Recovery.

Azure Site Recovery is a big time saver because it ensures that VMs are hydrated and ready. With the RTO of Azure Site Recovery, my company is able to save a huge amount of time since we are able to just flip the switch and get the power on compared to the need to restore in Veeam and then turn the power on. Compared to Veeam, Azure Site Recovery allows my company to save around 30 percent of the time on every VM that we need to back up and restore.

Azure Site Recovery is a very reasonably priced product.

My company considered a few options against Veeam and Azure Site Recovery.

Speaking about how Azure Site Recovery has facilitated the migration of on-premises workloads to the Azure Cloud, I would say that my company is still in the testing phase, and we also use Veeam. My company is trying to find the best spot for recovery, disaster recovery, and migrations. Veeam plays a big part in what my company does in terms of backup and recovery, so we are just trying to figure out how a Microsoft tool will fit into our environment.

I haven't faced any challenges using the product.

I recommended the solution to those who plan to use it.

I rate the overall tool a ten out of ten.

Azure Site Recovery's automated file synchronization was a game-changer in managing legacy systems. Setting up the sync was easy, and when disaster recovery was triggered, ASR automatically ensured seamless replication of files from the primary to the secondary server. With just a click, this feature simplified and expedited the entire process, providing a reliable solution for maintaining data consistency between servers during recovery events.

The primary area for improvement in Azure Site Recovery is its pricing. While the service is efficient and successful in handling recovery scenarios, especially for large companies dealing with substantial monthly data, the costs can be a significant consideration. The ease and speed of ASR in recovery are commendable, but addressing the pricing aspect would enhance overall satisfaction.

I have been using Azure Site Recovery for almost two years.

The stability of Azure Site Recovery is exceptional. We have conducted 12 tests from November last year until recently, and the stability has been consistently high. I would rate it a perfect ten out of ten.

In terms of scalability, I can't think of any additional functionalities needed for ASR at the moment. ASR has proven very effective for us, especially in the aspect of failing back to a secondary server. The scalability is impressive, as it doesn't matter where you are; you just need to set it up. We use both on-premises and Azure services, and so far, there hasn't been any limitation observed in recovering data to a secondary site, regardless of the size of VMs.

I would rate Microsoft's technical support a solid nine. AIA's substantial investment in Microsoft products allows us to easily connect with their support. Setting up meetings and triggering tickets for any concerns is a smooth process. They promptly provide engineers who efficiently address our issues. While some complex issues may take time to resolve due to thorough checking, overall, we have been very satisfied with Microsoft support.

Positive

Deploying ASR can take a few hours with the right expertise and prepared build sheets. However, factors such as connectivity issues and the size of VMs, especially when dealing with substantial data like 1.7 terabytes, can extend the synchronization time. In our experience, it took three days to complete synchronization for a large VM. During deployment and DR drills, around 15 people, including both internal and external team members, were involved. In the team handling infrastructure and services like ASR, there are about five individuals, two from one partner and three from another.

I would rate it as a seven out of ten in terms of costliness.

I would highly recommend Azure Site Recovery for any IT professional tasked with developing and managing critical business systems. It is one of the best services out there to ensure comprehensive coverage during times of disaster. Overall, I would rate ASR as a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is for disaster recovery and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). We have an infrastructure in Azure and we want to be able to spin up critical infrastructure in case of failures. We have not yet tested this in the cloud, but we have created a backup plan to ensure we are prepared for any potential failures.

For enterprise-level use, it is pretty good. However, for smaller customers, it can be a bit expensive compared to other solutions in the market. Personally, I prefer using Azure Migrate, as it is more cost-effective for smaller-scale use cases.

There is room for improvement in support because it can be very slow and unprofessional.

Another improvement can be there in terms of scalability. For example, it requires more time to sync with additional servers.

I have been using this solution for five years now. It's deployed on the Azure cloud, and it's a public cloud, not on any physical devices.

As a service provider, it is a stable product.

It is a scalable product. The system can start with only 100 machines but can be scaled up to more machines as needed. However, syncing 25 servers can take some time.

The support team took a lot of time to respond and was not very professional. They don’t come to the point easily.

The initial setup was easy for me because I've been working with it for several years now. The UI is pretty good. If the UI is pretty good, we can use it and get started easily. I got the solution set up pretty quickly.

The deployment time depends on whether you have all the permissions available from all the stakeholders. It can take up to two hours maximum. If you have all the information from the stakeholders, then it's much quicker.

Overall, I would rate the product a six out of ten.

We use the tool for business continuity purposes. 

The solution needs to improve replication and failover processes. We are still looking for improvements in the cost baseline. 

I have been working with the product for two years. 

I rate Azure Site Recovery's stability a seven out of ten. 

My company has seven users. The tool has three administrators. I rate Azure Site Recovery's scalability an eight out of ten. 

We haven't had to rely much on Microsoft technical support because we haven't faced many technical issues that required their help.

Neutral

My company infrastructure was on-prem before Azure Site Recovery. 

Azure Site Recovery's deployment is easy and without any challenges. 

The tool is expensive. What is expensive to me might not be expensive to you. As I mentioned, we seek ways to reduce our costs. If the price goes down, that would be great. I rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten. 

I recommend Azure Site Recovery because you can manage your infrastructure from anywhere using the wireless network. After the initial setup, you don't need many skilled personnel to manage it; once it's set up properly, you don't have to worry about it much. These are the main reasons why Azure works well for us.

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.