Forum Discussion
Azure Site Recovery failover/failback with in-guest iSCSI?
What is the behavior of ASR-protected VMs (VMware) with in-guest iSCSI disks? In this scenario, ASR would be used for DR, not migration (yet). I understand that protection of such disks result i...
I gave it a try and in my testing, the resultant new disk in Azure is not re-protected back to the original iSCSI disk. I guess since it's a new disk, Azure excludes it and does not recognize it as the same disk as the iSCSI. At least that has been my experience during testing.
I suppose in a migration it does not matter, and as Disaster Recovery, it serves its purpose on failover to Azure; but it definitely makes it more difficult to fail back to on-premises. The only options that I see to get that data back to the source are:
- Export the disk and then somehow deal with copying back the data to the iSCSI disk. This would be really painful for extremely large disks.
- Copy the data somehow (if you know what was changed) and copy it to the iSCSI disk.
- Delete the source VM and let ASR recreate it on re-protect. (I haven't tried this yet. I'm not sure if we'd still run into the situation where the iSCSI-converted-to-VHD disk is considered a new disk and is excluded, or if ASR will recreate the VM with the disk.