I'm looking to set up site replication for our Azure VM's. My question is this, how often are the VM's backed up/replicated to the DR site? Is this replication automated or would I need to kick off this process in a manual fashion?

Also, is there a difference between setting up site replication in the recovery services vault vs. setting it up by selecting the virtual machine?

As a test I was able to set it up by using both methods but I wasn't sure if one method offered different features or not. I'd appreciate any clarification on this matter.


Once replications is configured the actual replication process is done automatically, this process is continuous as explained here:

Replication is continuous when you're replicating Azure VMs to another Azure region. For more information, see the Azure-to-Azure replication architecture.

Since the replication is continuous, Azure provides you with crash-consistent recovery points each 5 minutes. Also, by default there is an app-consistent snapshot available each 4 hours, although you can set any value between 1 to 12 hours.

You get the same result setting this up from the VM than doing it from the recovery services vault, the fact that we have the option to do it in both places is only a matter of ease of use.

  • Thank you for this info, it was very helpful! – jrd1989 Mar 20 at 0:40

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