Question

A company runs a production line-of-business application on a single Azure VM in the East US region. The VM is protected by Azure Backup using a Recovery Services vault configured with Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS). During a planning exercise, the disaster recovery team asks how they can restore the VM into the paired region (West US) to validate their recovery runbook, without waiting for a Microsoft-declared regional failover. What must be enabled or done to support this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Enable the Cross Region Restore feature on the Recovery Services vault before backups are taken, then perform a restore selecting the secondary region.

Answer

Change the vault replication type to Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) so restores can target availability zones in the paired region.

Answer

Configure Azure Site Recovery replication for the VM, since Azure Backup cannot restore to a different region under any circumstance.

Answer

Wait for Microsoft to declare a regional outage, as customer-initiated restores to the secondary region are only permitted during a failover event.