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Joseph Ostreicher's avatar
Joseph Ostreicher
Copper Contributor
Jul 21, 2017

ASR Vs Azure backup

Hi,

What exactly is the difference between Azure Site Recovery and "Recover as a VM" from an Azure backup? Im asking from both a cost and recover efficiency perspective.  I assume both dont charge for compute resources until the resources (VM) are spinned up. Is it the time it takes to spin up the VM? Both use the same storage vault for storage so storage cost is the same, and i cant even choose Hot or Cold storage when creating the storage vault (or can i?) and/or attach disks. Besides for ASR being more expensive per protected instances, what other additional costs go along with ASR?

What "Type" of storage (e.g. Unmanaged/Managed P or S) am i billed for when backing up/replicating to an Azure backup vault?

Data & Storage
Storage
  • Kent Gaardmand's avatar
    Kent Gaardmand
    Steel Contributor
    Jul 25, 2017

    Azure site recovery feature is for onprem datacenter recovery.

    you can use site recovery for your Azure VM's to another datacenter, but these are treated as physical servers and does not allow a simple fail back method. (Azure VM's are now in preview, but i have not tested this. i know it has been a requested feature for sometime. so i assume you no longer have to treat them as physical machines. Read about the new feature here)

    Also site recovery has the option of creating recovery plans for how the datacenter should be restored, like network, disk location and so on.

     

    VM backup(backup), gives you the option backup and restore to a new VM or just export the disk to storage.

     

  • Trinadh Kotturu's avatar
    Trinadh Kotturu
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    Oct 27, 2017

    Primary difference being when you trigger a restore: Backup is for correcting human errors such as accidental deletion or corruption introduced because of a patch etc. On the other hand, disaster recovery is when your primary data center is gone and you want to run your business from secondary data center. Also, backup typically has a data loss up to one day(once a day backup is norm across VMs) where as Site Recovery, post restore you want data loss to be as minimal as few seconds to max minutes. 

    Given these differences, Azure Backup recovery mostly works on the source region as your production VM where as ASR recovery will let you failover to a different region than production VM region. 

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