Attempting to Enable Replication for BCDR for my VM's

Hello Brian Tetrault

The message in the portal is not a bug but it's a validation block from Azure Site Recovery. Looking at your screenshot, the Recovery Services Vault sd3itresource-bcdr and its resource group sd3itresource are both located in East US 2, which is the same region as your source VMs.

Per the official Microsoft documentation, For cross-regional disaster recovery, the source location should be different from the Recovery Services Vault and its Resource Group's location. However, it can be the same as any of them for zonal disaster recovery."

So the validation error you're seeing "The region of the Recovery Services Vault's Resource Group is the same as the source region. For cross-regional DR, please select a vault with its Resource Group and itself in a different region." is by design. ASR is telling you that an East US 2 vault cannot be used to replicate East US 2 VMs to another region.

The reason the blade initially defaults the Source dropdown to East US (and not East US 2) is that the portal pre-selects a region that would actually work with your vault — i.e., a region different from the vault's region. As soon as you change Source to East US 2, the same-region conflict triggers.

To proceed further you have two options:
Option 1 — Cross‑region DR (replicate East US 2 → another region)

This is the standard BCDR pattern. You'll need to create a new Recovery Services vault in a different region (the vault and its resource group must both be outside East US 2). Common target choices for East US 2 source workloads are Central US (Azure paired region) or any other supported region.

Steps:

1. Create a new Resource Group in, e.g., Central US.
2. Inside that resource group, create a new Recovery Services vault in the same region (Central US).
3. Open that new vault → Site Recovery → Enable replication.
4. On the Source tab, select Region = East US 2, your subscription, and the resource group that holds your VMs. The validation error will no longer appear because the vault is now in a region different from the source.
5. On the Replication settings tab, choose your Target location (Microsoft recommends keeping the target location the same as the vault location).

Note: You cannot reuse the existing sd3itresource-bcdr vault for cross-region DR of East US 2 VMs, the vault's region is fixed at creation time and cannot be changed. You must create a new vault in the desired remote region.

Option 2 — Zone‑to‑zone DR (stay within East US 2)

If your requirement is only to protect against an availability zone failure within East US 2 (not a full regional outage), you can continue with the existing vault in East US 2.

Steps:

1. On the same Enable replication → Source screen, set Region = East US 2.
2. Set Disaster recovery between availability zones = Yes (currently set to No in your screenshot).
3. Proceed to select VMs and the target availability zone within East US 2.

The yellow/red banner explicitly allows this case:"If you are protecting machines across zones, you may continue." Reference documentation:

• Configure replication for Azure VMs in Azure Site Recovery[m]](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/azure-to-azure-how-to-enable-replication)
• Tutorial: Set up disaster recovery for Azure VMs
• Move Azure VMs to a different Azure region with ASR (create vault in a different region)

Thanks,
Suchitra.

Create a resource group and the vault in it in the secondary region (East US)

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hth

Marcin