protected disk. As with Hyper-V protection to ASR, when using the guest-based agent,
there is no VM running in Azure until you perform a failover. The guest agent is used
when protecting VMs running on ESX and for physical machines. (However, physical
machines failed over to Azure can fail back only to ESX VMs and not back to a physical
machine.) There is an in-guest agent for Windows and Linux. There is no schedule for
the replication; instead it sends as quickly as possible, meaning generally that the
replica is within a second or two of the source.
ASR also integrates and manages SQL Server Always On replication in addition to SAN
replication when replicating between on-premises locations. For a full list of
workloads that can be protected with ASR, see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/documentation/articles/site-recovery-workload/. Remember that ASR also
integrates with Azure Automation, which is essentially PowerShell. This means that
any type of failover that is possible through PowerShell can also integrate with an ASR
recovery plan.
ASR is licensed through the Operations Management Suite or as a separate license.
Note that ASR provides the replication technology, and the only additional cost is the
storage used in Azure Storage and the compute charges in the event of a failover. The
ASR license for on-premises to on-premises replication is cheaper than on-premises to
Azure replication. Remember that use of ASR is free for the first 31 days for any
protected workload, which enables it to be used as a migration solution without
charge. Beyond 31 days, it is a metered service, and you will be charged accordingly.
Getting Started with ASR
Microsoft has great documentation for Microsoft Azure that details the steps to
implementing ASR for each of the scenarios. This section walks you through the
basics of getting started using ASR.
The first step is to create a Recovery Services vault that houses the replication and
backup services. In the Azure portal, select New, and in the Marketplace, search for
Backup and Site Recovery. Select the Backup And Site Recovery (OMS) result and click
Create. Enter a name for the vault and a location, as shown in Figure 8.14. Note that
the location should be where you wish to create the VMs in Azure in the event of a
disaster.