We have a lot of customers that want to use Canadian regions on Azure. Azure Recovery Services in Canada is not available in the portal as the moment of writing this article. A solution without a solid backup strategy is not really serious and cannot even be considered IMO. What can we do from here if you really need to be in a Canadian region? There is a way to create Recovery Services resources in Canada but there is a little twist to enable it.
Problem
Recovery Services is available in a lot of Azure regions but not all features are yet ready for the Canadian regions (Hybrid backup is an example) so it is not publicly available in Canada.
There is a way!
You can activate the preview of ASR in Canada using PowerShell in a matter of seconds, to do so, you can use the following script:
#requires -Version 2.0 -Modules AzureRM.Profile, AzureRM.Resources
param(
[Parameter(Mandatory = $true)][string]$SubscriptionName
)
$ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop'
Add-AzureRmAccount
Set-AzureRmContext -SubscriptionName $SubscriptionName
Register-AzureRmResourceProvider -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.RecoveryServices
Register-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName RecoveryServicesCanada -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.RecoveryServices
The registration state should indicate Registering to not long after change to Registered.
If you want, you can get the status of the registration state using the following command:
Get-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName RecoveryServicesCanada –ProviderNamespace Microsoft.RecoveryServices
It might take a couple of minutes for the change to be effective in the portal. You can sign out and sign in again into the Azure portal to ensure the desired option is visible to you.
Wait did you say "Preview" ? What about SLA ?
Even if it's available in preview for Canadian regions, you'll get the same SLA that applies to ASR in other regions, meaning it is considered safe for your production workloads.