Hey Checkyourlogs Fans,

 

Today I want to have a look at some planning tools that Microsoft provides to help you get started with Microsoft’s Azure Site Recovery. As always with any project planning is an essential part of the equation. Before this tool, all of our work to plan a Disaster Recovery project with Azure Site Recovery was done with spreadsheets in Excel.

 

This tool will help automate the process and help us get a good cost estimate as well and appropriate sizing requirements for the project.

 

First, you should read up on the tool at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/hyper-v-deployment-planner-overview

 

This blog post will focus on some of my highlights with the tool.

 

Step 1 is to download the tool and extract it: https://aka.ms/asr-deployment-planner

 

 


 

Step 2 – Open an administrative command prompt

Step 3 – Create a text file with the list of Hyper-V Servers mine is called servers.txt

Step 4 – Store the list of VM’s in a File

ASRDeploymentPlanner.exe -Operation GetVMlist -ServerListFile “c:\post-install\servers.txt” -User Hyper-VUser1 -OutputFile “c:\post-install\asrvms.txt”


 

 

Step 5 – Profile the VM’s, in this case, we will profile the VM’s for 60 minutes. In production, you would look to do this for 15-30 days. There are good examples in the Microsoft Documentation on how to do this and even store the data in a Microsoft Azure Storage Account.

ASRDeploymentPlanner.exe -Operation StartProfiling -Virtualization Hyper-V -Directory “C:\Post-Install\Hyper-V_ProfiledData” -VMListFile “c:\post-install\asrvms.txt” -NoOfMinutesToProfile 60 -User Contoso\HyperVUser1


 

Step 6 – Wait for the report to complete. The tracing and logging data from the tool are stored in the output directory you specified earlier. Note the shortest duration for running this analysis is 30 minutes.

 


 

Step 7 – Run the report. Note you need to run this on a machine with Excel 2013 or higher on it.

Here are some examples of the types of reports that can be run:

 

Generate a report with the default values

ASRDeploymentPlanner.exe -Operation GenerateReport -virtualization Hyper-V -Directory “E:\Hyper-V_ProfiledData” -VMListFile “E:\Hyper-V_ProfiledData\ProfileVMList1.txt”

 

Generate a report when the profiled data is on a remote server

 

ASRDeploymentPlanner.exe -Operation GenerateReport -Virtualization Hyper-V -Directory “\\PS1-W2K12R2\Hyper-V_ProfiledData” -VMListFile \\PS1-W2K12R2\vCenter1_ProfiledData\ProfileVMList1.txt

 

Generate a report with a specific bandwidth that you will provide for the replication

 

ASRDeploymentPlanner.exe -Operation GenerateReport -Virtualization Hyper-V -Directory “E:\Hyper-V_ProfiledData” -VMListFile “E:\Hyper-V_ProfiledData\ProfileVMList1.txt” -Bandwidth 100

Generate a report with a 5 percent growth factor instead of the default 30

 

ASRDeploymentPlanner.exe -Operation GenerateReport -Virtualization Hyper-V -Directory “E:\Hyper-V_ProfiledData” -VMListFile “E:\Hyper-V_ProfiledData\ProfileVMList1.txt” -GrowthFactor 5

 

Generate a report with a subset of profiled data

ASRDeploymentPlanner.exe -Operation GenerateReport -virtualization Hyper-V -Directory “E:\Hyper-V_ProfiledData” -VMListFile “E:\Hyper-V_ProfiledData\ProfileVMList1.txt” -StartDate 01-10-2017:12:30 -EndDate 01-19-2017:12:30

 

Generate a report for a 5-minute RPO

ASRDeploymentPlanner.exe -Operation GenerateReport -Virtualization Hyper-V -Directory “E:\Hyper-V_ProfiledData” -VMListFile “E:\Hyper-V_ProfiledData\ProfileVMList1.txt” -DesiredRPO 5

 

Step 8 – Once completed review the results of the report.

Here is a sample of what the main report page looks like:

 


 

Details on what you can see in the report can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/hyper-v-deployment-planner-analyze-report

 

I hope you check this out in your environment and that this helps you out with your journey to Microsoft Azure.

 

Thanks,

 

Dave