Great question—this is a super common mix-up, so let’s break it down into practical, actionable terms:

• It’s about more than just data replication: Azure Storage Replication only handles copying your underlying data (like VHDs, blobs, etc.) across regions or zones. But ASR is a full disaster recovery orchestration tool. It takes care of spinning up VMs in the recovery region, reconfiguring networking (IP addresses, NSGs, load balancers), managing DNS settings, and even automating end-to-end failover/failback workflows. Storage replication can’t do any of that—you’d have to manually rebuild your entire infrastructure if the primary region goes down, which is slow and error-prone.
• Better control over recovery points and consistency: Storage replication (like GRS) gives you a limited set of recovery points, usually just the latest synchronized state. ASR lets you retain multiple recovery points (including crash-consistent, file-consistent, and application-consistent snapshots for apps like SQL or Exchange) so you can roll back to a specific point in time if needed. Application-consistent snapshots are crucial here—they ensure your apps boot up without data corruption after failover, which storage replication alone doesn’t guarantee.
• Flexible recovery options: Storage replication is tied to specific region pairs or within a single region (for LRS/ZRS). ASR lets you replicate VMs to any Azure region, not just the paired one, and even supports replicating to on-premises environments if you need hybrid DR. It also lets you run test failovers without disrupting your production environment—something storage replication can’t facilitate easily.
• RTO/RPO management: ASR lets you define and track your Recovery Time Objective (how fast you need to get systems back up) and Recovery Point Objective (how much data you can afford to lose). It automates the failover process to meet those targets, whereas storage replication requires manual intervention to get your workloads running again, which can easily blow your RTO.

Short answer: Yes, it does. All Azure Storage Replication types (LRS, ZRS, GRS, GZRS) replicate every piece of data stored in your storage account. That includes:

• Unmanaged VHD blobs
• Managed disks (since these are stored in Azure-managed storage accounts behind the scenes)
• All other blob types, files, tables, queues, etc.

But remember: Even though the VHDs are replicated, you can’t just launch a VM from them in the secondary region without manual work. You’d have to create a new VM, attach the replicated VHD, reconfigure networking, and fix any dependencies—all steps ASR handles automatically. That’s the key difference between raw data replication and full disaster recovery orchestration.

内容的提问来源于stack exchange，提问作者Pragmatic