Backup and Site Recovery

Question 1

Azure Backup

Answer 1

Offers a reliable and scalable data protection solutions for backing up and restoring data across on-premises and cloud environments. Azure Backup helps organizations protect their critical data, applications, and workloads by providing automated backups, offsite storage, and disaster recovery capabilities.

-App Consistent Backups: Engage the O.S to write data before backups (files, apps, etc)
-Short to Long-Term Retention: Store daily, weekly, yearly backups. Retain backups for up to 10 years
-Comprehensive Compatibility: Support Windows, Linux, SQL, SAP, PostgreSQL, Hyper-V, VMware & more

Implementation

1. Vault: Stores the backup data and defines various storage/backup settings
   -Same region as the resource you want to backup
2. Backup Policy: (Per-type) define what to backup, when, and the retention period.
3. Backup Item: Using various agents, Azure Backup supports a variety of data sources

Implementation Overview

-Supports protection for PostgreSQL, Blobs, Disks (Backup Vault, SQL VM, SAP VM, VM, Server, Files Share (Recovery Services Vault).

-What we want to backup, will determine the type of Vault we will use (Backup Vault & Recovery Services Vault)

-Backup Policies are per workload type

-If you want to backup every workload, you would’ve to create a policy for each of the different resources

-You can use one backup policy for the type of resource (e.g. 4 VMs)

-If you want to backup anything using the Backup Vault, then you’re going to need a managed identity that has access to the resource

-If you want to backup servers using a Recovery Services Vault, then you’ll have to use an Agent

-For VMs you don’t have to use deploy an agent, you can use the built.in VM agent that is available by default

-If you want to deploy this on some other servers you could either use the Microsoft Azure Revocery Services Agent, which gives you control over the files and folders that you want to backup. Or if you want to have something more advanced that provided bare metal restore capabilities for perhaps on-premises Hyper-V, then you’d need to install the Microsoft Azure Backup Server

-If you want to backup File Shares, you will have to register that SA with you given Recovery Services Vault, that you want to perform that backup to

You can use the “Backup Center” to manage it easily, to look up all of your vaults, ports, alerts, and jobs, in a single place.

Question 2

App Service Backups

Answer 2

Backup Options

1. Automatic backups (Basic, Standard, and Premium) by default

-Up to 30 GB in size
-Does not include linked database
-Does not require a storage account
-Backs up hourly, 30 days retention
-Everything is backup up and handled for you
-Not downloadable

2. Manual - Custom backups (Basic, Standard, Premium and Isolated)

-Up to 10 GB in size
-Can include linked database (4 of 10 GB)
-Requires a storage account
-Frequency & retention is configurable
-Backup data can be filtered (partial)
-Downloadable as Azure Storage Blobs

Configuration

1. App: Backups are enabled (or customized) on a per-app basis
2. Custom Backup: Enable custom backups, a schedule, and a Linked Database (Optional)
   -How frequent and time retention
   -If your app uses some sort of linked database, you can optionally choose to include that within your backups
3. Backup Data: Backup data to a Storage Account, Exclude data using a “filter file”
   -Where do we want that data to reside
   -Blob container
   -You can use a filter file, if you don’t want to back everything up

Question 3

Azure Site Recovery

Answer 3

ASR is a cloud-based disaster recovery service that helps organizations protect and recover their workloads and applications in the event of planned or unplanned outages, disasters, or datacenter failures.

-ASR enables seamless replication, failover, and failback of virtual machines (VMs), physical servers, and applications between on-premises datacenters and Azure or between Azure regions.
-Provides us with really low recovery time objectives, using a recovery plan (thanks to continous replication)

-RPO: Maximum amount of data expressed time that can be lost during a disaster recovery situation before that loss will exceed what the organization can tolerate. Lower RPO = More Frequent Backups = Higher Cost

-RTO: Is the maximum tolarable length of time that a system can be down after a failure or a disaster occurs. Recovery Time begins at the moment of failure and ends when the system is operational and handed back to the business in a fully tested state.

Key Features

-FailoverPlans (Assists RTO)
-Continuous Replication (Assists RPO)
-Reduced DR Costs: Instead of having an entire site, with ASR you are just repliacting to a storage account
-App-Consistent Recovery Points: If you got applications, the replication can be configured to provide app consistent recovery points, so you can have multiple recovery points that you can roll back to, in the event of a disaster or issues.
-Network Managemnt: You can fail over to manage networks that are deployed, ready to go
-Comprehensive Support: You can have support for many different workloads, even if they are on-premises or in another cloud provider

Implementation

1. Recovery Services Vault: Only stores metadata relating to protected items, plans, etc.
   -What are the instances we are protecting? How frequently are we replicating those instances?…
   -Management that contains all of the job information, configuration, and so on.
2. Infrastructure: You’ll need various items to support ASR - VNets, Applicances, Storage Accounts, etc
   -The actual information gets stored here
   -When we replicate those machines, they get replicated accross to a SA.
   -If you have physical servers, or if we have VMware servers, we can go and deploy a “Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Appliance”. This contains all of the software needed to actually configure this sort of replication
   -If you are using Hyper-V, you can install the “Azure Site Recovery Provider”, and you can install that on your Hyper-V host
   -After that, you’ll have to register your site (on-premises or cloud) and configure a Replication Policy
3. Replication Policy: The frequency, consistency, and recovery points for Replicated Items
   -We should be associated to our site, already
   -To start the replication, you are going to do so on a per-server basis
   -You can perform a failover on a per-server basis
4. Recovery Plan: Pre/post manual/automatic tasks for failing over multiple instances
   -You can go here and say “if failure occurs, we want to migrate them all at once” using the information replicated on the SA.
   -You can make a complex plan to decide which/when servers should fail over, if so, in any sort of grouping arrangement, or do we have any pre/post tasks to perform
   -You can perform automated tasks using Azure Automation