Microsoft added a new option to Windows 365 to facilitate advanced Disaster Recovery (DR). Although disaster recovery and business continuity are already part of your Windows 365 license this new feature provides extra possibilities.
Snapshot based
Cross-Region Disaster Recovery is available only with Windows 365 Enterprise and is a paid add-on to your current Windows 365 license. There is a good reason for this. When this feature is enabled, Windows 365 automatically takes snapshots of your Cloud PCs and provisions them in a location of your choosing. This means you are consuming additional resources in another region, at a cost of approximately $5 per Cloud PC, which is a reasonable price.
In reality, this add-on is not necessary for everyone. The default disaster recovery options included in your licenses will be sufficient for 90% of use cases. However, for companies that require “the next step”, additional options are now available.
Setting up
After buying the “Windows 365 Cross Region Disaster Recovery Add-On” license, head over to Intune and your Windows 365 blade.
Navigate to the user settings and create a new policy or edit an existing one. Here you’ll notice that a new option has become available. Like with everything with Windows 365, this is super easy to set up and requires no knowledge of complex data recovery solutions. Simply enable the option and choose which region you want the snapshots to be created in.
That’s it!
Keep in mind that you take geographic distance into consideration. If your user is in West-Europe and the Cloud PC is in West US, I can assure you that this will have impact on the performance and general user experience.
Network selection
Windows 365 offers two network selection options that you can configure, with Microsoft Hosted Network being the preferred option. Choosing this option requires no extra configuration.
If you’d go for the Azure Network Connection (ANC) make sure that your Azure setup is also configured in the same region. Otherwise you won’t have connectivity to your Azure environment once a Disaster Recovery takes place.
To validate your setup, create a temporary provisioning policy where you deploy a few test Cloud PCs to the same region you defined above. This is especially important when opting for ANC
RPO and RTO
The reason why the Cross-Region DR settings are located within the user-settings is because it’s tied to the frequency of the point-in-time restore points. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the same as the configuration you made in there. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is different and currently is calculated to be around 4 hours. In case you are unfamiliar with RPO and RTO, RTO is the maximum amount of time it should take to restore your system after a failure, RPO is the maximum amount of data you can afford to lose.
Full copies of the Cloud PC are kept at the DR location, including all user data that’s stored on the VM.
Report
Windows 365 provides nice out-of-the-box reports of the current provisioning status of all the Cloud PCs. Additionally, if a DR took place, an administrator is automatically notified and the administrator has the option to easily revert back to the default region.
The reports can be found at the traditional report location, navigate to the Intune admin center -> Reports -> Cloud PC overview – Cross-Region Disaster Recovery status (preview)
Conclusion
Cross-Region Disaster Recovery is a new add-on that increases the disaster recovery options for your Cloud PC. It provides extra options at a reasonable price, enabling more complex use cases. When configuring this feature, consider the distance between the Cloud PC and the end user to minimize latency and performance issues and ensure you validate the DR setup thoroughly before deploying it to production.
A DR strategy that’s not been validated is not a valid DR plan.
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