As you probably know, you can backup your servers using Recovery Service Agent (MARS) when using Azure Backup.
Well, you can now enable cross-region restore (CRR) to help you ensuring service continuity when the primary region is unavailable or to test recovery on the secondary region for audit/compliance purposes.
Before being able to do so, you first need to:
- use the latest version of the Recovery Service Agent (2.0.9254.0 at the time of writing – available here https://aka.ms/azurebackup_agent)
- to have turn on cross region restore on your recovery vault (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-create-recovery-services-vault#set-cross-region-restore/) – it can take up to 48 hours for backup items to be available in the secondary region
Once these requirements are met, you can recover your data to the secondary zone.
Before being able to recover your data to the secondary zone, you will need to download the vault credential file for the secondary zone from the Properties\Backup Credentials blade
Then launch the MARS agent console to select Recover data and then select the Secondary Region as recovery location
If you want to automate/schedule restore drill on the secondary region, you can use this link https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-client-automation#cross-region-restore providing PowerShell commands to so.