Review - Opsgility Lab: Implementing Azure Site Recovery – Azure to Azure

MSDN subscriptions are now called Visual Studio Subscriptions. One of the benefits you get with the annual Visual Studio Subscriptions is access to the Opsgility Azure training website. With the free Visual Studio Dev Essentials program, you get access for a shorter duration. I found their course catalog impressive. I especially found their Labs feature interesting and finished one today -

Lab: Implementing Azure Site Recovery – Azure to Azure
In this lab, you will configure Azure Site Recovery to protect a sample n-tier application by configuring replication from the source Azure region to a target Azure region. Once the initial replication has completed and the application is protected, you will perform a test fail over and validate application functionality. Finally, you will accomplish the cleanup of the test failover resources.

A lab is no fun if it goes smoothly. I encountered the following error after I chose South India as the location for deploying the sample application through an ARM template -

az group deployment create --name "CloudShop" --resource-group "CloudShopRG" 
--template-uri 
"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/opsgility/lab-support-public/master/cloud-shop-single-web-server/CloudShopRG.json" 
Deployment failed. 
{ "error": 

 "code": "SkuNotAvailable", 
 "message": "The requested size for resource '/subscriptions/zzz/resourceGroups/CloudShopRG/providers
/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/SQLVM-1' is currently not available in location 'southindia' for subscription 'zzz'. Please try another size or deploy to a different location. See https://aka.ms/azureskunotavailable for details." 
 } 
}


It turned out that the specific VM SKU referenced in template isn't available in the Azure South India data center. I wonder if there is a way to check for availability of services in a chosen Azure location prior to running the script  & preempt execution errors.

This Lab provided good guidance & I'll be going back to try out more.

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