Microsoft announced the availability of a new Disaster Recovery Addon, it’s called Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus and is available next to the regular Cross-Region Disaster Recovery Addon. Disaster Recovery Plus is an advanced version of Cross-Region Disaster Recovery specifically designed for companies with higher DR requirements.
Please keep in mind that Windows 365 is high available by default on all licenses within a single zone, these addons provide additional features to replicate your cloud PC to another geographical region.
It works with Enterprise only
Just like Cross-Region Disaster Recovery, Disaster Recovery Plus is only available for Windows 365 Enterprise. It is not supported on Frontline, neither in Dedicated nor in Shared mode. If you’d like to see this feature for Frontline, I suggest submitting feedback to Microsoft through the Feedback Hub, or by contacting me :).
Pre-Allocated capacity
A big advantage of Disaster Recovery Plus, is its Pre-Allocated capacity in the secondary region. What does this mean? When you configure DR Plus, a secondary Cloud PC is provisioned in advance in the secondary region. During a disaster recovery activation, Microsoft simply swaps the disk so you are ready to resume your work in no time. With Cross-region DR, on the other hand, the snapshot is available in the secondary region. When initiating a DR, Microsoft starts building the Cloud PC based on the available snapshot.
One-on-One comparison
So there are two addons focused on providing DR capabilities, let’s compare their features one by one.
| Feature | Disaster Recovery Plus | Cross-Region Disaster Recovery |
|---|---|---|
| Provisioning | Pre-allocates a secondary Cloud PC at configuration time, ensuring immediate availability during an outage. Replicates a copy of the Cloud PC each hour. | Creates temporary Cloud PCs in an alternate region upon activation, depending on available capacity at the time of the outage. Copies the last PIT restore point for the Cloud PC. |
| Recovery Time Objective (RTO) | Faster recovery due to pre-allocated resources. This gives a RTO of less than 30 minutes for tenants with fewer than 50000 Cloud PCs in a region. | Target RTO of less than 4 hours for tenants with fewer than 50,000 Cloud PCs in a region. |
| Recovery Point Objective (RPO) | Less than 60 minutes! | Minimum 4 hours, based on the frequency of the Point In Time restore points configuration. |
| Activation | Admins must manually activate and deactivate; Users can initiate the DR themselves. (configurable) | Admins must manually activate and deactivate; |
| Licensing | Available as a licensed add-on for Windows 365 Enterprise edition. | Available as a licensed add-on for Windows 365 Enterprise edition. |
| User Experience During Outage | Users access a pre-allocated secondary Cloud PC with all applications and settings based on state during replication within the last 60 minutes. Work done during the outage should be saved to Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint, as the temporary Cloud PC is not preserved after DR rollback. | Users access a Snapshot based secondary Cloud PC with all applications and settings based on state of the last Point In Time restore point (between 4h and 24h). Work done during the outage should be saved to Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint, as the temporary Cloud PC is not preserved after DR rollback. |
Mix and Match
You can mix and match Cross-Region Disaster Recovery and Disaster Recovery Plus for different Cloud PCs. However, it’s important to note that a single user, if they have multiple Cloud PCs, cannot have both CR DR and DR Plus simultaneously. Also, if a user has multiple Cloud PCs, all Cloud PCs assigned to a user will be protected by either Disaster Recovery Plus OR Cross-Region Disaster Recovery.
That said, you can have different groups of users assigned to either DR Plus or CR DR . For example, one set of users may have Cross-Region Disaster Recovery enabled, while another group, such as executives or VIPs, may be assigned Disaster Recovery Plus.
Pricing
Considering the feature differences between DR Plus and Cross-Region DR, it’s to be expected that there is a significant price different between these two addons. Which is understandable, as you get access to a permanently available second Cloud PC.
There are three variations of this addon which is based on the total of vCPUs of the Cloud PC where the addon will apply on:
- Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus up to 4vCPU, which costs € 45,5 list price/month
- Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus up to 8vCPU, which costs € 91 list price/month
- Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus up to 16vCPU, which costs € 182 list price/month
The add-on price is always lower than the least expensive Cloud PC SKU with the same number of vCPUs.
Cross Region DR is around € 5 / Cloud PC / list price / month.
Setting up Disaster Recovery Plus
The setup process for Disaster Recovery Plus is very similar to Coss-Region Disaster Recovery (which I described in one of my previous posts.). You configure it in the user settings (Intune -> Devices -> Windows 365 -> User Settings), where DR plus is now available as a secondary option next to Cross-Region Disaster Recovery or “NONE”, for that matter if you don’t want to configure DR options for all users.
After configuring the license you’ll just select the Geography and the Region, as you are used with configuring Cross-Region DR. When selecting Disaster Recovery Plus, another option will appear, which is not available to Cross-Region Disaster Recovery:
“Allow user to initiate Disaster Recovery Plus service”
This is the setting that allows that user to initiate the DR from within the Windows App. Which is really powerful. However, you probably don’t want to give this power to all users.
Activating or Testing Disaster Recovery Plus
With each DR solution it’s important to test it from time to time. Lucky testing is simple and straightforward. It starts from the Bulk device actions menu in Intune -> Devices -> All devices -> Bulk device actions.
This will also trigger a warning for the administrator indicating that the user won’t be able to access their Cloud PCs until the DR process has completed.
Next, simply select the Cloud PCs which you want to move. Click on confirm and press “Create”. Only devices with a correct license will show up in this list.
The same process can be followed to deactivate Disaster Recovery plus.
User Experience
Once initiated, the target Cloud PC will shut down, and any user accessing the Windows App will see a notification stating that Business Continuity is being enabled or being disabled. During this process, the connection button will be grayed out.
It will keep the Business Continuity marking as long as the Cloud PC is in the secondary region. The screenshot above, in English, is from the Windows App, while the one below, in Dutch, is from the Web App. During preview, only the Web App was supported. If the Cloud PC is in the secondary region, Business Continuity will show a check mark.
Clicking on it allows the end user to disable it, provided this option is enabled in the user settings. If the user is initiating the disaster recovery process themselves, they will be notified that they will be redirected to a secondary Cloud PC, which may take up to thirty minutes.
Reporting
Reporting functions the same way as with Cross-Region Disaster Recovery. A nice report is available clearly indicating whether Cloud PCs are protected by Disaster Recovery and displaying their status, including whether they are active in the secondary region.
Disaster Recovery Plus will also show up as an action in the Cloud PC actions report, accessible via Intune -> Devices -> Monitor -> CloudPC Actions.
Final thoughts
With the addition of Disaster Recovery Plus alongside the Cross-Region Disaster Recovery add-on, Windows 365 proves to be a good solution for companies with even the highest disaster recovery requirements. In my testing, initiating a DR was even faster than the promised 30 minutes.
To wrap up, it performs well, is easy to set up, and remains intuitive, keeping the core simplicity of Windows 365 in mind. Overall, it’s a nice addition to the Windows 365 line-up. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could use this for Disaster Recovery on our physical machines as well? Just thinking out loud. 🙂 Feel free to share your thought in the comments.
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