The disaster recovery environment for an on-premises SharePoint 2013 farm can be hosted in Windows Azure.
- Windows Azure IaaS provides a secondary datacenter.
- Pay only for the resources you use.
- Small recovery farms can be scaled out after a disaster to meet scale and capacity targets.
The recovery farm in Windows Azure is configured as identically as possible to the production on-premises farm.
- Same representation of server roles.
- Same configuration of customizations.
- Same configuration of search components (these can be on a smaller version of the production farm).
Log shipping and Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) are used to copy database backups and transaction logs to the Windows Azure farm.
- DFSR is used to transfer logs from the production environment to the recovery environment. In a WAN scenario DFSR is more efficient than shipping the logs directly to the secondary server in Windows Azure.
- Logs are replayed to the Windows Azure-based SQL Server computers.
- Log-shipped databases are not attached to the farm until a recovery exercise is performed. Failover procedures:
- Stop log shipping.
- Stop accepting traffic to the primary farm.
Replay the final transaction logs.
- Attach the content databases to the farm.
- Start a full crawl.
- Restore service applications from the replicated services databases.Recovery objectives provided by this
SharePoint Disaster Recovery to Windows Azure
Aryan Nava 