Alternative DR Solutions
Although Azure Site Recovery provides the best balance of recovery speed, data protection, and cost for the organization's requirements, other approaches including the ones below were considered.
Veeam Backup and Replication
Veeam provides two relevant approaches for disaster recovery: backup-based recovery and VM replication. Veeam backup based recovery can provide strong protection against data loss and ransomware by maintaining multiple recovery points, but recovering the environment in Azure requires restoring the virtual machines before they can become operational. This additional restoration process can increase the RTO compared with Azure Site Recovery's continuously replicated workloads. Veeam replication provides faster recovery because replica virtual machines are maintained at a secondary target and can be failed over rather than fully restored from a backup. However, a traditional Veeam replication architecture requires an available target virtualization environment to continuously maintain the replicas. For the credit union, maintaining a secondary VMware cluster would introduce additional hardware, licensing, storage, and operational costs. While Veeam is an effective solution, its infrastructure requirements make it less cost effective than ASR for a disaster recovery environment that only needs to operate when the primary on premises site is unavailable.
Cloud Based Hypervisor Replication
Azure VMware Solution (AVS) provides another alternative by extending VMware infrastructure into Azure. AVS would allow the organization to maintain a VMware environment in Azure and recover workloads using the same VMware technologies used at the primary site. However, AVS requires dedicated Azure VMware infrastructure to remain deployed even when there is no failover event. This creates substantially higher ongoing costs compared with ASR, where replicated workloads can remain in Azure storage without requiring the Azure VMs to run until a failover occurs. This same cost consideration applies to other DR solutions that require continuously running target infrastructure, as the organization must maintain and pay for the recovery environment even when no disaster has occurred. AVS would be a better fit if the organization intended to maintain a permanent VMware environment in Azure, rather than using Azure exclusively as an emergency disaster recovery site.
Traditional Secondary VMware Site
This approach can provide solid stability in the event of a failover, but it requires additional servers, storage, networking, licensing, power, and facility costs. Azure Site Recovery eliminates the credit unions need to maintain a full secondary datacenter for cost savings and decreasing complexity of maintaining another full on prem environment.
