Azure SiteRecovery Provides Native Support for SQL AlwaysOn

Microsoft has announced the integration of its SQL AlwaysOn service with Azure Site Recovery. The latter provides guidance to setup disaster recovery for various workloads keeping in mind the unique availability requirements for each application.

With Azure Site Recovery providing native support for SQL AlwaysOn, SQL Availability Groups can be added to ASR Recovery plans along with virtual machines.

As a result of this, all capabilities of ASR Recovery plans like sequencing, scripting and manual actions can be leveraged to orchestrate the failover of a multi-tier application that uses a SQL database, configured with AlwaysOn replication, as its backend. SQL AlwaysOn is used for disaster recovery of SQL Servers, and ASR can be used to replicate the virtual machines forming application and web frontend tiers to Azure.

According to Microsoft Azure team, this release provides best in class replication for each tier of the application in addition to the rich fail-over orchestration capabilities provided by ASR. It takes away the need to write and manage scripts required for failover of SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups.

This solution is currently supported only for System Center Virtual Machine Manager managed environments.

For more information about how to set things up, check out the Azure Site Recovery documentation.