Hello everyone,
If you rely on mission-critical applications that use shared disks, there’s exciting news from Azure! Microsoft has announced the public preview of disaster recovery (DR) support for shared disks in Azure Site Recovery, making it easier to protect workloads that require high availability, such as SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI), SAP ASCS, and Scale-out File Servers.
This new capability allows Azure-to-Azure disaster recovery for Windows virtual machines running Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) in an active-passive configuration. With this, you can now set up DR strategies that keep your clustered applications resilient even in case of unexpected failures.
How does it work?
To take advantage of this feature, you need:
✔️ A Windows VM (2016 or later) configured with WSFC.
✔️ Shared disks (Standard or Premium SSD) attached to your clustered VMs.
✔️ Azure Site Recovery enabled to replicate and failover your workloads.
Currently, the public preview supports regional and zonal disaster recovery, giving you the flexibility to choose the best approach based on your architecture. However, active-active clusters and non-clustered distributed appliancesare not yet supported.
Why is this important?
With shared disk DR support, organizations running clustered workloads can now implement a fully integrated disaster recovery solution in Azure, without needing additional third-party tools. This means less complexity, better cost-efficiency, and improved business continuity.
This feature is now available for testing, so if you’re managing business-critical applications in Azure, it’s a great time to check it out!
You can learn more by exploring the Azure documentation here.
Stay tuned for more Azure updates! 🚀