What is the point of having Geo-redundant recovery service vault with/without Cross region restore?

Question

There are two back up configuration options for Azure Recovery Service Vault - LRS vs GRS

This is a question regarding Azure Recovery Service Vault.

How does geo-redundant enabled recovery service vault being handled when its residing region failed ? If the cross region restore is not being enabled for a recovery service, which by default it isn't, what will happen to my recovery service vault ?

I am trying to find out the difference between enabling cross region restore and not to. There is not much info that i can find through the internet and official documents. Configure cross region restore for recovery service vault

There is one more helpful link GRS vs LRS. However, as of time writing, seems like cross region restore has not been enabled, and right now, it is on enabled in west central us. However, we can enable GRS for all(most) regions.

Answer 1

The Recovery Services vault is an entity that stores the backups and recovery points created over time. Azure Backup automatically handles storage for the vault. The LRS and GRS mean to the Storage Replication type. Read the storage replication strategy.

Locally redundant storage (LRS) replicates your data three times within a single data center.

GRS replicates your data to another data center in a secondary region, but that data is available to be read only if Microsoft initiates a failover from the primary to secondary region.

Storage Replication type by default is set to Geo-redundant. The CRR feature is based on A vault created with GRS redundancy. So you can enable GRS for all(most) regions but CRR is currently available in the WCUS region. Read here.

As the GRS storage replication, If the primary region that geo-redundant enabled recovery service vault residing on failed, Microsoft initiates a failover from the primary to a secondary region. The secondary region serves as a redundant source for your data.

With CRR enabled service, The restore operation on the secondary region can be performed by Backup Admins and App admins. Which gives you full control to restore data to a secondary region. The secondary region is an Azure paired region.

Without CRR enabled service, you probably could not restore all the Azure VMs for the selected recovery point if the backup is done in the secondary region. You can create a new VM from a restore point, restores a VM disk, replace a disk on the existing VM. See the restore options.

Hope this could help you.

Answer 2

THis is another answer from Cross Region Restore - check comments for reference purpose.

The storage redundancy configuration for the Recovery Services Vault (RSV), is specific to Azure Backup data, not Azure Site Recovery (ASR).

This means, in the event of an Azure region failure, if the RSV is configured with Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS), then (with the help of the Azure support team), the RSV can be made available in the paired Azure region, and the data would be accessible.

The cross-region restore (CRR) option, is something that’s specific to Azure Backup, not ASR. You can have an RSV configured with GRS storage, but not have CRR enabled. The CRR feature allows you to take a backup of a VM in Region1, and perform a VM restore in Region2. The storage redundancy is for geo-failover of the RSV itself in the event of a full Azure region failure.