Jump to:
Creating an Application
Launch the Create Application Process
Select Cloud Provider and Set Up Microsoft Entra Directory
Specify Application Name, Azure Subscriptions and Regions
Set Recovery Point Objective
Connect Arpio To Your Azure Subscriptions
Select Application Resources
Creating an Application
Arpio aligns your disaster recovery plans with the applications or workloads you operate in production. For each of your applications that you'd like to setup disaster recovery, you'll define an application in Arpio.
Your first application was set up when your Arpio account was created. You can create as many additional applications as you need.
Launch the Create Application Process
To begin defining a new application, click the "Create new" link under "Applications" in the left-side navigation bar in the Arpio console.
Select Cloud Provider and Set Up Microsoft Entra Directory
On the “Create an Arpio Application” page, the first step is to select your cloud provider. Choose “Azure” from the Cloud Provider dropdown.
Selecting Azure will add a step to set up your Microsoft Entra Directory. Access and security in Microsoft Azure is managed by Entra (formerly Azure Active Directory/AAD). Subscriptions are aligned to a tenant/domain within Entra, similar to how AWS Organizations work with accounts.
Select an existing Entra directory from the dropdown, or click “Add Microsoft Entra Directory” to add a new one. When adding a new directory, provide a friendly name and the Directory ID from your Azure portal. Your Directory ID can be found in the Azure portal by navigating to Microsoft Entra ID and copying the Tenant ID displayed on the overview page.
Specify Application Name, Azure Subscriptions and Regions
Each application has a friendly name used to represent it in the Arpio console and in reports. You can provide any name you like, but typically you’ll use the name by which your organization knows this workload.
Arpio works by replicating your Azure infrastructure to another Azure region, and optionally to another Azure subscription. Specify the subscription and region where this workload currently runs, and the subscription and region you’d like to recover it to.
Your Azure Subscription IDs can be found in the Azure portal. Using the search bar at the top of the portal, type “subscription” and select Subscriptions from the list. Your Subscription IDs are listed on that page. They follow the format: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.
The “Where do you currently operate this application?” field takes your primary subscription ID and region. The “Where do you want to recover this application?” field takes your recovery subscription ID and region.
While replicating to an alternate subscription is optional, doing so provides a defense against disasters where a bad actor compromises your primary environment. We recommend using a dedicated recovery subscription with minimal permissions granted.
Click "Continue" to move to the next page.
Set Recovery Point Objective
For each application in Arpio, you define a recovery point objective, from every 15 minutes up to 24 hours (or as "real-time", if you have real time RPO replication enabled). Arpio works to ensure your latest recovery point is never older than this objective.
Connect Arpio To Your Azure Subscriptions
If you haven’t previously connected Arpio to the specified Azure subscription(s), you’ll need to do that now. Arpio provides you with commands to make this easy.
To connect each environment, open the Azure Cloud Shell from the top navigation bar in the Azure portal. When prompted, select “Bash”, then “No storage account required”, and select the correct subscription from the dropdown before clicking “Apply”.
Copy the command provided by the Arpio portal for the Recovery Environment and paste it into the Cloud Shell as plain text (in Microsoft Edge, right-click to access the paste-as-plain-text option). Press Enter to run the command. This command uses a Microsoft Azure ARM resource template to create the Arpio delegate environment in the specified subscription. The process will take several minutes, keep the window open until it completes.
Once the Recovery Environment command completes, repeat the same steps using the command provided for the Primary Environment. When both have completed, return to the Arpio portal and test the connection for both environments.
Select Application Resources
The last step is selecting the Azure resources that comprise your application. You can select resources directly, or you can specify tags that you have applied to those resources. Or, you can do both.
Arpio knows the relationships between your Azure resources, and automatically selects dependee resources for you. You can usually select just a few resources and let Arpio find the rest automatically.
As your application changes over time, Arpio continues to apply these selection rules to find resources for each recovery point. If a selected resource disappears, that resource and anything it depends upon will no longer be included in future recovery points. If your environment is dynamic, you'll probably find that choosing resources by tag is more appropriate.
To select resources by tag, simply type the tag name or use the drop-down to select from the tags that Arpio has discovered. Once a tag name is provided, you can type a value, or use the drop-down to select from the values Arpio has discovered for this tag. You'll notice that matching resources and their dependees are automatically checked in the list below.
You can specify as many tags as you'd like.
To select specific resources, click the check box next to the resources you'd like to include. Dependee resources are automatically checked.
You can mix tag selection and specific resource selection as you see fit. Arpio will create recovery points that include the combination of all resources that match tags, are specifically selected, or are depended upon by other selected resources.
You're Finished!
Once you've selected resources for your application, you're finished. Click the "Finish" button to complete the process of creating your application.
Arpio will now initiate the process of creating the first recovery point and will then apply the first recovery point to the recovery environment, creating the resources that Azure does not charge for. Resources that cost money won't get created until you execute a test or a recovery. In the meantime, all you'll pay Azure for is the cost of data transfer and data storage in the recovery environment.
Creating the first recovery point will take several minutes as a full copy of your infrastructure and data is transferred to the recovery environment. Subsequent recovery points are incremental, transferring only what has changed, and will happen faster.