Always On Primary Replica On Prem, Secondary Replica On Azure

Question

We want to create an Always On Availability group where the primary replica will be On-premises and the secondary replica will be on an Azure VM. I have researched and I know it's possible to do this, but in all the examples I find, they always have a secondary replica on-prem as well and then the 3rd VM is the one that goes to azure. We only want to have 2 replicas, one on-prem and one on azure. Is this possible?

I have read the documentation to use the "Add Azure Replica Wizard" and one of the prerequisites is: Your availability group must contain on-premise availability replicas. I'm not sure if that means that I have to have at least one secondary replica on-prem or if it only means that I have to create the availability group first on-prem and then only add the secondary replica.

Thanks for your help and guidance!

Answer 1

We only want to have 2 replicas, one on-prem and one on azure. Is this possible?

Yes, it's possible. There are extra items you'll want to think about such as having a domain controller (if ad-attached clustering/cluster at all is used) and what type of pipe you'll need, region and latency, load balancer setup, etc., but it's not a hard requirements to have more than two replicas. Most have two replicas locally for HA and the Azure one for DR.

have read the documentation to use the "Add Azure Replica Wizard" [...]

That wizard no longer works as it was based on the classic Azure model and is no longer available or viable. Disregard using the wizard. You'll want to deploy this via a written script or by hand (Azure web gui) after all of the required infrastructure pieces are decided upon and understood. Obviously setting up a test environment to see how things behave would behoove you.