DR Setup on Azure

Cloud Services | Client Location: South Africa

Client entity belongs to Government of Johannesburg who deals into public services.

Client is having on-prem VMware & Physical server infrastructure for Business-Critical Applications, Microsoft Exchange and Internal Portals. This infrastructure was hosting around 81 server and a backup solution in place.

Employees were using Fortinet VPN gateway to connect to on-prem while working from home during pandemic.

Client was facing problem of frequent long hours of load shedding which was causing downtime of infrastructure and employees were not able to deliver their work and getting hit back from local citizens.

Team of Sapizon suggested to build a DR environment on Azure and replicate all business-critical servers to allow users to continue their work during power outages.

For Migration Assessment:

• For their VMware VMs: Using Azure
• For their Physical Servers: Using third-party
• For their Databases: Replicate DB servers as it is to

For Migration Execution:

• For their VMware VMs: Azure Site Recovery (ASR).
• For their Physical Servers: ASR, port disks or third-party tools.
• For their Databases: Direct VM replication.
• Storage: Azure Blob
• Site-to-Site VPN: Fortinet VPN
• Site-to-Point VPN: Azure VPN
• We also suggested the client some other approaches where needed. Approaches like re- install, refactor, re-architect and

Azure Migrate assesses the suitability for migration. It also visualizes dependencies and provides
sizing recommendations. Along with that, it provides cost estimates in order to manage spending and forecast on how the money is going to be spent.

Azure Site Recovery helps in migration and disaster recovery. It does incremental data transfer on all types of workloads including physical and VMware machines for platforms like Windows.

Then for their Database Migration, we directly migrated servers as it is to Azure which then setup by the DB team to work.

We did online migration to minimum the downtime which took bit higher time but eventually goal was achieved within timeline.

In the cases where lift-and-shift migration to Azure was not suitable, different approaches with a few options were suggested.

In the case where an application had few users and their needs could have been met in other ways, the workload had to be simply retired or to be considered for Cloud Native apps.

Single Point of Failure:
By implementing DR for the client, now Single Point of Failure is addressed. Users can now connect to Azure infrastructure using their individual Azure site-to-point VPN.

Improvement:
Increased operational reliability, productivity, and end user satisfaction.

Appreciation:
Client started getting positive feedbacks from local citizens for availability of services.