Replication From a Protected Site vCenter Server to a Recovery Site Microsoft Azure
You can protect virtual machines to Microsoft Azure. The procedure is the same whether you intend to protect one virtual machine or multiple virtual machines.
When creating a VPG from vCenter server to Azure the data is stored in a storage account and all replicated data from protected virtual machines to Azure is encrypted in the storage account. All recovery operations bring up the recovered machines in resource groups in Azure.
■ Azure ZCA can be installed only on Windows Server 2012 R2 and higher.
■ Only virtual machines that are supported by Azure can be protected by Zerto Virtual Replication. All Windows operating systems are supported.
Note: Microsoft does not support operating systems that are past the
End of Support date, without a
Custom Support Agreement (CSA). For more information about Microsoft operating systems support for Microsoft Azure, refer to
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2721672.
■ To replicate between Azure and your site, you must have a virtual machine in Azure with a Zerto Cloud Appliance installed on it. This ZCA must be paired with your site.
■ For Linux distribution, refer to Azure documentation:
Requirements for Replication From Azure
■ For Virtual Machines to be protected from Azure, the VM volumes must reside in the Standard storage account defined during ZCA installation.
A Standard storage account is created or selected upon ZCA installation.
■ Type: Standard storage
■ Recovery and journal volumes reside on this Zerto Storage Account
■ Azure VMs with all disks on this Zerto Storage Account can be protected by Zerto.
■ Blob Storage is not supported.
■ Managed Disks are not supported.
■ VMs which are not deployed via the Azure Resource Manager cannot be protected from Azure.
Requirements for Replication To Azure
■ Protected volumes are recovered in Azure as VHD disks in a page blob. Virtual machines with disks that are less than 1GB are recovered with disks of 1GB.
Note: For some instance sizes, the Azure virtual machine is created with a Local SSD disk which is a temporary disk. This disk is in addition to the disks associated with each protected virtual machine.
■ The following limitations apply when protecting to Azure
■ Virtual machines with UEFI Firmware cannot be protected.
■ You cannot protect machines that have a disk larger than 4 TB.
■ The protected virtual machines needs to have at least one NIC.
■ Reserve at least 2 CPUs and 4GB RAM for the machine using a subnet accessible by other Zerto Virtual Replication sites.
■ The supported number of data disks and NICS per virtual machine is dependent on the selected instance size. For example, instance size D3_v2 allows up to eight data disks per virtual machine.
Requirements for Replication within Azure
■ Azure ZCA on both Azure sites need to be version 6.0 and higher.
■ The following limitations apply when protecting within Azure:
■ Self replication is not supported.
Additional Azure Considerations
For additional considerations, see
Azure subscription and service limits, quotas and constraints:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-subscription-service-limits.For example from the link, see the following default values:
■ There can be multiple Zerto Cloud Appliances per Azure subscription and region.
■ 20 cores per subscription
■ 200 Storage accounts per subscription
■ 20 VMs per region per subscription
■ 20 VMs per series (Dv2, F, etc.) cores per subscription per Region
Additionally, see the following example for maximum values:
■ A Standard storage account has a maximum total request rate of 20,000 IOPS. The total IOPS across all of your virtual machine disks in a Standard storage account should not exceed this limit.
VM Tier | Basic Tier VM | Standard Tier VM |
Disk size | 4 TB | 4 TB |
Max 8 KB IOPS per persistent disk | 300 | 500 |
Max number of disks performing max IOPS | 66 | 50 |
Azure Limitations Which Affect Installation and Recoverability
Below are the default Azure limitations which affect installation and recovery.
Default Azure limitations which Affect Installation
■ Storage Limitations:
■ Number of storage accounts: 200 per subscription (note: max is 250)
Default Azure Limitations which Affect Recovery
Virtual Machines Limitations | VMs per subscription per region: | 20 (max: 10K) |
VM total cores per subscription per region: | 20 |
Instance sizes: | Limited per region. Many of them are 20 cores per region per subscription |
Resource groups per subscription: | 800 |
Networking | Network interfaces per region: | 350 |
NICs per instance: | Depends on instance size: |
Private IP Addresses per VNET per subscription per region: | 4096 |
Cloning of IP addresses during recovery operations: | Due to an Azure limitation, failing over Linux VMs with static IP is not supported. |
Storage | Storage account total size limitation: | 500 TB (# of entities (blobs, containers etc) within a storage account: unlimited) |
Max size of a page blob (vhd): | 4 TB |
Min size of a page blob (vhd): | 20 MB |
Max number of data disks: | Depends on instance size |
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