Disaster recovery means getting a service running again from another region or site, with success judged by RPO and RTO; uptime SLAs and data retention are different concerns.
Also called disaster recovery.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains DR in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- region
A provider-defined grouping in VCF Automation of Supervisors that all share one NSX Local Manager; tenants consume its compute, storage and memory via quotas set per region.
- LSDOU
The sequence in which Group Policy is processed: the local policy first, followed by site, domain and organisational unit policies. The nearest, last-processed setting takes effect unless Enforced or Block Inheritance alters that.
- RPO
Recovery point objective: how much data, expressed as time, you can afford to lose. In a VM backup policy the smallest achievable RPO is the backup frequency.
- RTO
Recovery time objective, meaning how long you can tolerate a service being down before it is restored. Failing over with Site Recovery typically takes minutes; a restore from backup takes hours.
Related terms
- Azure Site Recovery
Disaster recovery service replicating VMs to a secondary site or region; recovery time is measured in minutes and recovery points are kept for no longer than 15 days.
- Azure SQL Managed Instance
Fully managed SQL Server instance offering almost complete compatibility, including SQL Agent, CLR and queries across databases; disaster recovery to another region is achieved with auto-failover groups.
- Hyper-V Replica
A feature included with Hyper-V in Windows Server that copies VMs asynchronously from one Hyper-V host to another to provide disaster recovery.
- Paired region
A region linked with another in the same geography so updates are rolled out in sequence and recovery is prioritised. It is the typical disaster recovery target, though pairing does not trigger failover automatically.
- Restricted-access region
An Azure region, frequently one half of a region pair, intended mostly for disaster recovery within a country; deploying to it requires you to request access first.