Fail over and fail back Azure VMs between Azure regions

Prerequisites

• Make that you've completed a disaster recovery drill to check everything is working as expected.
• Verify the VM properties before you run the test failover. The VM must comply with Azure requirements.

Run a failover to the secondary region

1. In Replicated items, select the VM that you want to fail over > Failover

   

2. In Failover, select a Recovery Point to fail over to. You can use one of the following options:

   • Latest (default): This option processes all the data in the Site Recovery service and provides the lowest Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
   • Latest processed: This option reverts the virtual machine to the latest recovery point that has been processed by Site Recovery service.
   • Custom: Use this option to fail over to a particular recovery point. This option is useful for performing a test failover.

3. Select Shut down machine before beginning failover if you want Site Recovery to attempt to do a shutdown of source virtual machines before triggering the failover. Failover continues even if shutdown fails.

4. Follow the failover progress on the Jobs page.

5. After the failover, validate the virtual machine by logging in to it. If you want to go another recovery point for the virtual machine, then you can use Change recovery point option.

6. Once you are satisfied with the failed over virtual machine, you can Commit the failover. Committing deletes all the recovery points available with the service. The Change recovery point option is no longer available.

Reprotect the secondary VM

After failover of the VM, you need to reprotect it so that it replicates back to the primary region.

1. Make sure that the VM is in the Failover committed state, and check that the primary region is available, and you're able to create and access new resources in it.

2. In Vault > Replicated items, right-click the VM that's been failed over, and then select Re-Protect.

   

3. Notice that the direction of protection, secondary to primary region, is already selected.

4. Review the Resource group, Network, Storage, and Availability sets information. Any resources marked (new) are created as part of the reprotect operation.
5. Click OK to trigger a reprotect job. This job seeds the target site with the latest data. Then, it replicates the deltas to the primary region. The VM is now in a protected state.

Fail back to the primary region

After VMs are reprotected, you can fail back to the primary region as you need to. To do this, follow the failover instructions.