Microsoft’s Azure Site Recovery (ASR) provides businesses of all sizes with an automated protection and recovery system in the cloud. Yesterday, the Redmond giant rolled out an update that extends that system further, supporting Citrix, XenDesktop and XenApp environments.
“We have been working closely with Citrix to validate and provide guidance on leveraging ASR to build a robust, enterprise-grade DR solution for the recovery to Azure of on-premises XenDesktop and XenApp environments running on VMware/Hyper-V,” said Poornima Natarajan, program manager, cloud and enterprise.
Essential Component Protection
According to Natarajan, ASR now protects a variety of related components, in XenDesktop and XenApp. Here’s the full list:
- “Citrix Delivery Controller
- StoreFront Server
- XenApp Master Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA)
- XenApp License Server
- AD DNS Server
- SQL Database Server”
The implementation also comes with several other features. Users can recover an application to a specific point in time, letting to roll back your Citrix VDI environment to specific states.
You can also test recovery non-disruptively, trialing the failover of a Citrix VDI to Azure without disrupting any current tasks.
Finally, Microsoft is touting the ability to create flexible recovery plans. These can be used to customize recovery order, add automation scripts, and determine manual actions to occur in the case of a failover.
To aid new users, Microsoft has collaborated with Citrix on some extensive documentation. The guide explains how to set up Azure Site Discovery step-by-step and explains the underlying concepts.
You can find more information about these changes on the Azure blog, and Site Recovery on the official site.