What happens to an organization that does not have a disaster recovery plan in place?
Well, research says that almost 93% of enterprises without a DR plan had to shut down their business within one year.
This is implementing a thorough DR plan is necessary to pinpoint applications that should be made available during an outage, the time taken for a complete restoration, and data loss acceptability rates. However, to initiate this plan, organizations need to invest in server infrastructure, bandwidth sizing for data replication, and data center capacity.
One way to minimize the complexity of DR plan implementation is to set up a secondary site on a public cloud server. Cloud service providers help to optimize this entire process. Regarding Microsoft, Azure Site Recovery helps the IT team manage failover and bring the on-prem servers to Azure as Azure VMs. Having said that, the team still needs a clear direction to define their recovery targets and replication strategy. Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner can help organizations with just that.
Before delving into how and why you need the Deployment Planner, let's first understand what it is.
Read our blog on crafting an effective Disaster Recover Strategy on Azure
What is Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner?
Simply put, Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner is a tool to gather data about existing VMware VMs and Hyper-V (such as networking and storage requirements) and leverage that data to plan failover and replication. The best part about this is that IT teams do not have to additionally deploy any hypervisors or inside VMs to enable this tool.
Why Do Organizations Need Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner?
Checking Infra Feasibility: Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner can check if the legacy infra shares any kind of compatibility issues with Azure Site Recovery. This is done by offering a holistic view of storage requirements and bandwidth to make sure that the deployment becomes a smooth process.
Assessing Bandwidth: With Azure Site Recovery depending on the network connectivity to copy data from on-prem to Azure, the deployment planner designates the necessary bandwidth levels required for seamless data replication and recovery.
Understanding Storage Needs: For any disaster recovery plan, assessing storage requirements is of utmost importance. Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner evaluates the amount of storage an organization should need for replicating their data.
Enabling Performance Metrics: As the Deployment Planner provides performance metrics during the assessment stage, the report generated can be used for enhancing or updating the DR plan to meet the required business objectives.
Evaluating Costs: For the costs involved in setting up the Azure Site Recovery, the Deployment Planner offers an end-to-end view of the bandwidth and storage requirements, aiding in resource and budget planning.
Mitigating Risks: Planning is better than cure. Meaning, that before deployment, organizations should conduct a thorough risk assessment via the Deployment Planner, mitigating the risks and enhancing business resiliency.
Leveraging Scenario Validation: Using the Deployment Planner can help in replicating the failover scenarios, ensuring that the DR strategy meets the defined targets of Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
Making Documentation: Generating reports to evaluate the DR strategy, the Deployment Planner uses this documentation to help organizations maintain compliance and carry out regular audits.
Read the blog on 10 Steps Required for Creating a Disaster Recovery Template
How Does the ASR Deployment Planner Work for VMware and Hyper V: A Template
The ASR Deployment Planner consists of three components:
- Profiling
- Report Generation
- Throughput Calculation
Profiling
In this step, organizations vets out or profile on-prem servers that need to be safeguarded within 30 days. This tool can store multiple performance counters such as data churn, Write IOPS, R/W IOPS, and other VM features such as the number of NICs, size of disks, and number of cores. This is done by connecting the VMware vCenter Server to the place where the virtual machines are hosted.
Report Generation
Based on the profiled data, this tool helps to produce a deployment planning report in MS Excel format. Typically, this report consists of 5 sheets:
- Input
- VMs to storage placement
- Compatible VMs
- Non-compatible VMs
- Recommendations and suggestions
Throughput Calculation
Finally, in this section, the tool enables network throughput from on-prem servers to Microsoft Azure for ASR replication. This helps in assessing the required bandwidth needed for driving ASR replication. Additionally, this tool takes only 95% percentile of the performance metrics and a 30% growth factor. Both the growth factor and percentile are configurable. Planning through deployment is necessary for both migration and disaster recovery situations
Read our blog on how organizations can prevent downtime and achieve uninterrupted continuity
Set up Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner with Cloud4C
With Azure's new ASR Deployment Planner, organizations need a managed services partner to ensure their servers benefit from robust ASR replication experience and performance while running on Microsoft Azure.
Cloud4C, a leading managed service provider, offers managed Disaster Recovery-as-a-service ( DRaaS) services that come with tools, platforms, process management, and documentation to ensure complete restoration on the primary site, post DR.
Along with customizing DR solutions based on the critical impact on workloads, our team of experts help in failover testing and management. They can also help in outlining Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) goals to ensure high availability and agility. By crafting a robust digital strategy, we ensure that organizations can continue running their businesses disruption-free in case of unpredictable outages.
Read this case study to learn how a leading UAE-based port management firm, achieved continuous business continuity and high performance through Cloud4C's Azure DRaaS services.
Looking to simplify your DR implementation process on Azure? Get in touch with us today or visit our website.
