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Microsoft

Azure Site Recovery

Azure's disaster recovery service: continuously replicates servers to a second region or into Azure and fails over when needed.

Overview

Azure Site Recovery in practice

Azure Site Recovery continuously replicates running servers to a second location — Azure region to Azure region, or on premises into Azure — and fails over to it in an emergency. The service creates a crash-consistent recovery point every five minutes; that interval is fixed and cannot be changed. Application-consistent points, taken through the Volume Shadow Copy Service, are possible no more often than once an hour.

With managed disks, retention reaches back up to 15 days. Recovery plans sequence the start-up order of multi-tier applications, and a test failover rehearses the real thing in an isolated network without touching production. Important for current planning: the classic experience for VMware and physical servers was retired on 30 March 2026, leaving only the modernised architecture with a replication appliance. Backup and disaster recovery are part of the Alendris managed services scope.

References

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