General availability of Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware and Hyper-V

I am excited to announce the general availability (GA) of the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware and Hyper-V. This tool helps VMware and Hyper-V enterprise customers to understand their on-premises networking requirements, Microsoft Azure compute and storage requirements for successful Azure Site Recovery replication, and test failover or failover of their applications.

Apart from understanding infrastructure requirements, our customers also needed a way to estimate the total disaster recovery (DR) cost to Azure. In this GA release, we have added detailed estimated DR cost to Azure for your environment. You can generate a report with the latest Azure prices based on your subscription, the offer that is associated with your subscription, and the target Azure region for the specified currency. The Deployment Planner report gives you cost for compute, storage, network, and Azure Site Recovery licenses.

Key features of the tool

• The Deployment Planner can be run without having to install any Azure Site Recovery components to your on-premises environment.
• The tool does not impact the performance of production servers, as no direct connection is made to them. All performance data is collected from the Hyper-V server or VMware vCenter Server/VMware vSphere ESXi Server, which hosts the production virtual machines.

What aspects does the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner cover?

As you move from a proof of concept to a production rollout of Azure Site Recovery, we strongly recommend running the Deployment Planner. The tool provides following details:

Compatibility assessment

• A VM eligibility assessment to protect to Azure with Site Recovery

Network bandwidth need vs. RPO assessment

• The estimated network bandwidth that's required for delta replication
• The throughput that Site Recovery can get from on-premises to Azure
• RPO that can be achieved for a given bandwidth
• Impact on the desired RPO if lower bandwidth is provisioned

Microsoft Azure infrastructure requirements

• The storage type (standard or premium storage account) requirement for each virtual machine
• The total number of standard and premium storage accounts to be set up for replication
• The storage-account placement for all virtual machines
• The number of Azure cores to be set up before test failover or failover on the subscription
• The Azure VM-recommended size for each on-premises VM

On-premises infrastructure requirements

• The required free storage on each of volume of Hyper-V storage for successful initial replication and delta replication
• Maximum copy frequency to be set for Hyper-V replication
• The required number of Configuration Servers and Process Servers to be deployed on-premises for VMware to Azure scenario

Initial replication batching guidance

• Number of virtual machines that can be replicated to Azure in parallel to complete initial replication

Estimated DR cost to Azure

• Estimated total DR cost to Azure: compute, storage, network, and Azure Site Recovery license cost
• Detail cost analysis per virtual machine
• Specifies replication cost and the DR-Drill cost

Factoring future growth

• All the above factors are impacted after considering possible future growth of the on-premises workloads with increased usage

How does the Deployment Planner work?

The Deployment Planner has three main modes of operation:

• Profiling
• Report generation
• Throughput calculation

Profiling

In this mode, you profile all the on-premises servers that you want to protect over a few days, e.g. 30 days. The tool stores various performance counters like R/W IOPS, Write IOPS, and data churn, as well as other virtual machine characteristics like number of cores, number/size of disks, number of NICs, ect., by connecting to the Hyper-V server or the VMware vCenter Server/VMware vSphere ESXi Server where the virtual machines are hosted.

Report generation

In this mode, the tool uses the profiled data to generate a deployment planning report in Microsoft Excel format. The report has six to eight sheets based on the virtualization type:

• On-premises summary
• Recommendations
• Virtual machine to storage placement
• Compatible VMs
• Incompatible VMs
• On-premises storage requirement (only for Hyper-V)
• Initial replication batching (only for Hyper-V)
• Cost estimation

By default, the tool takes the 95th percentile of all profiled performance metrics and includes a growth factor of 30%. Both these parameters, percentile calculation and growth factor, are configurable.

Throughput calculation

In this mode, the tool finds the network throughput that can be achieved from your on-premises environment to Microsoft Azure for replication. This will help you determine what additional bandwidth you need to provision for replication.

With Azure Site Recovery’s promise of full application recovery on Microsoft Azure, through deployment planning is critical for disaster recovery. With the Deployment Planner, we will ensure that both brand new deployments and existing deployments get the best replication experience and application performance when running on Microsoft Azure.

Learn more about Hyper-V to Azure Deployment Planner and VMware to Azure Deployment Planner.

Source: Azure Blog Feed