Q. If I use Azure Site Recovery to replicate and failover services to Azure how will my clients access once they failover?
A. Azure Site Recovery enables workloads to be replicated to Azure which could be from Hyper-V, VMware or even physical systems. During a failover VMs would be created in Azure using the replicated storage which is contained in Azure Storage as a VHD. At this point the services are now running in the Azure virtual network. For clients to connect they need IP connectivity which would be achieved by connecting your on-premises network to the Azure virtual network which would likely already be in place and can be achieved using:
- Site-to-site VPN
- ExpressRoute
The only requirement on the clients would be the IP address of the final service would have changed. Hopefully clients access servers via a DNS name and so the DNS entry would need to be updated to point to the IP address of the service in Azure. This would also mean the DNS entry would need a Time To Live (TTL) that is low enough that in the event of a failover clients will get the updated IP address for the record.
Another consideration is clients may not be able to actually get to their machines or they are unavailable. In these scenarios you could use Remote Desktop Session Host servers hosted in Azure to offer the required client applications which users could then access either via a VPN to their company (which has the link to the Azure virtual network), via Point-to-site (P2S) VPN directly to Azure virtual network or via the Internet by also using a RD Gateway in Azure as well.
