This post is a series of blog posts for Azure Site Recovery (ASR).

• ASR for VMs being hosted within Azure
• ASR for a Hyper-V hosted On-Premises, coming soon…
• ASR for an ESXi hosted On-Premises, coming soon…

Here is a step by step walk-through on how to go about setting up and configuring ASR (Azure Site Recovery) and backing up your On-Premises Virtual Machines (VMs) with Azure Resource Manager (ARM).

First things, first, Azure’s Recovery Service Vault is a unified vault/resource that allows you to manage your backup and data disaster recovery needs within Azure. For example, if you are hosting your VMs on-premises you can create a link between your on-prem site and Azure to allow your VMs to be backed-up into Azure. This is regardless of your hypervisor, it can be either ESX or Hyper-V, either will work. However for the interest of this blog post, I will be setting up ASR for VMs being hosted on your On-Premises environment on a Hyper-V 2012R2 environment.

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Configuring Azure

Step 1: Create a Recovery Services Vault

Within Azure Resource Manager (ARM), if we select New, within the Marketplace, select Monitoring + management, then select Backup and Site Recovery (OMS) within the featured apps. Of course if this is no longer present, just search for it within the marketplace.

Next we will now need to create our vault.

Give it a meaningful name, and you can either create a new Resource Group, or use an existing. I opted with existing, as I will (another post) next setup a Site-to-Site ASR.

Give this a few seconds, maybe minutes to do its thing…

Great, now our Vault is up and ready to go!

Step 2: Choose your Protection Goal(s)

Click Settings > Site Recovery (Under Getting Stated) > Step 1: Prepare Infrastructure > Protection Goal > And specify the following > Click OK:

• Replicating to: Azure
• Machines Virtualized: Yes, with Hyper-V
• Using SCVMM (Virtual Machine Manager): No

Step 3: Setup the Source Environment

Next, we will now need to give our Hyper-V site a name, “Ravi-OnPrem” makes sense here, but give it something meaningful.

Once validated, we can now go ahead with the Azure Backup Agent. Download the Azure Backup Agent, and also, download the Backup Credentials.

Download the Agent and Credentials to the server you will be backing up. In my example, I will be backing up a Windows Server 2016 (RTM).

Step 4: Microsoft Azure Recovery Site (MARS) Agent Install

The Microsoft Azure Recovery Site (MARS) Agent is a pretty simple install, but here is what I experienced when installing:

Since my environment is pretty open, ie. No Proxy, no changes required here.

Your call here..

All good with the MARS prerequisites… Hit Install!

All good, time to register our server to our Recovery Services Vault.

 

Step 5: Register Server to Azure Recovery Services Vault

Here is where we will need that VaultCrentials file.. I hope you downloaded it as mentioned earlier… As you can see, back in the first few steps, when we created our Vault, the settings are now automatically inputted.

Here, I decided to let the wizard generate the Passphrase. I then saved the key locally to the server.

 

Perfect! Now we can go ahead and with the Azure Back: Site Recovery/Backup Schedule, etc.

Step 6: Configuring Microsoft Azure Backup

Going back to our On-Prem server, which by the way is a Windows 2016 OS, let’s launch Microsoft Azure Backup…

Click on Schedule Backup within the (Right) Actions Pane:

Since this is a basic server, I only allocated 1 drive for this example, once we hit Backup, I am presented with the available drives.

Now we can begin defining our Backup Schedule

Step 7: Specify Backup Schedule

For this example, I want to back up the following server with the following properties:

• Backup once a week @ 4AM, every Monday

Retention Policy will be as follows, see below:

Once you are satisfied with the policy, go ahead and hit next. Since we want to back up to Azure, and not an offline backup, we will backup over the network.

Have a look over before we do the initial backup.

Step 7: Initiate Backup Now

Going back to the main console, within the right pane, within Actions, let’s initiate our Back Up Now.

If we now double click within the job, we can see the Backup has begun….

Step 8: Validate Backup

If we go back to Azure, and take a look at our Vault properties, we can see there is a Backup in progress.

If we drill down within the Backup, we can see our server being backed-up.

After a few minutes, we can go back to the server, and track its progress:

 

And likewise, if we go within to the Azure Resource Manager, and within the Vault Backup jobs, and take a look at the details, we can see data is being updated to Azure.

 

Perfect!