Kurt Shintaku's Blog

When you use Site Recovery, you incur charges for:
[from the documentation]

1. The Site Recovery license is per protected instance, where an instance is a virtual machine or a physical server. (Either $16/mo or $25/mo as of 3/15/23)
2. Storage cost is incurred for the Site Recovery replica of storage in the target location. A snapshot taken on this replica storage is used to create a new target storage disk upon test failover or failover. Overall storage cost is hence, based on replica of storage and the number of disaster recovery drills conducted in a year.
3. Storage transactions are charged during steady-state replication and for regular virtual machine operations after a failover or test failover.
4. Outbound data transfer cost is also called as egress and is charged only when the traffic leaves an Azure region. Hence, these charges are applied when you replicate an Azure virtual machine from one region to another. Azure Site Recovery compresses the data before you transfer. Hence, egress is charged for the compressed replication data.
5. Recovery points created by Site Recovery are snapshots taken for the replica storage. These snapshots are charged based on the consumed capacity. For more information, see Managed Disks pricing.
6. Costs are also incurred for the virtual machine compute capacity and is only applied at the time of test failover and failover. This cost is usually zero provided there’s no active disaster recovery drill or no actual disaster.
7. For Azure virtual machine protection, Site Recovery mimics the source storage type on target side. For example, if you protect a virtual machine in Azure with disks in storage accounts, then Site Recovery uses a storage account in the target side to store replication data. In another case, if a virtual machine in Azure uses managed disks, then Site Recovery creates an ASR replica disk in the target that corresponds to each source disk.
8. For VMware/physical machines, Site Recovery creates an ASR replica disk in the target that corresponds to each source disk. All new replications from March 2019 onwards use managed disks for both replication and failovers. Managed disk cost is computed on provisioned capacity. For more information, see Managed Disks pricing.
9. For Hyper-V machines, Site Recovery creates and uses a storage account for replication. By default, the test failover or failover happens on a storage account. However, it provides an option to failover to managed disks if required. In this case, managed disks are created at the time of failover.

For detailed cost estimation, visit:

Review the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner cost estimation report for disaster recovery of Hyper-VM/VMware to Azure

• VMware: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/site-recovery-vmware-deployment-planner-cost-estimation
• Hyper-V: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/hyper-v-deployment-planner-cost-estimation