BACKUP Policy And Recovery Service Vaults in Azure with Real-Time Example

BACKUP Policy and Recovery Service Vaults in Azure with Real-Time Example

      

Recovery Services Vault

A Recovery Services vault is a storage entity in Azure that houses data. The data is typically copies of data, or configuration information for virtual machines (VMs), workloads, servers, or workstations.

You can use Recovery Services vaults to hold backup data for various Azure services such as IaaS VMs (Linux or Windows) and Azure SQL databases.

When you create an Azure Backup for virtual machines, you need to either create a Recovery services vault or select an existing Recovery services vault.

To create a vault to protect virtual machines, the vault must be in the same region as the virtual machines. If you have virtual machines in several regions, create a Recovery Services vault in each region.

You can't delete a Recovery Services vault with any of the following dependencies:

You can't delete a vault that contains protected data sources (for example, IaaS VMs, SQL databases, Azure file shares).

You can't delete a vault that contains backup data. Once backup data is deleted, it will go into the soft deleted state.

You can't delete a vault that contains backup data in the soft deleted state.

You can't delete a vault that has registered storage accounts.

Therefore, resource group deletion will fail. You must stop the backup before initiating a delete.

   

   

     

    

     

    

       Virtual Machine Backups

 

   

  

  

Labs and Review

              BACKUP And Backup Policies

Following are existing backup policies which are being used as the defaults available for workloads.

Recovery Service Vaults

 

A Recovery Services Vault will be configured in each subscription which will be configured to backup VMs with the appropriate policy.

The Vault will utilize GRS storage so that, in the event of a disaster within the region, the backups data can be made available by Microsoft. 

There is no SLA provided by Microsoft at the time of writing for the speed of restore process.

Recovery Service Vaults :The ASR RSV and Azure Backups will be deployed to separate resource groups as per the table below.

   Virtual Machines will be backed up with the Azure native backup service. Backups will be stored in an Azure Recovery Service Vault stored in the same region as the VMs being backup up. The Recovery Services Vault will be replicated through Geo-Redundant Storage from the to a paired region within the geo-political region (North Europe to West Europe).

Azure backup will take image-based snapshots daily.  There are three levels of backup consistency that are achievable, depending on the workload and its activity at the time the backup is taken.

       

    

     

Backup

Virtual Machines running MS SQL Server will be configured to back up to a local Recovery Services Vault.

 

Backup Policies can be created to achieve the following:       Full database backups every day or week

      Transaction log backups every 15 Minutes to 24 hours       Retention period is maximum of 9999 Years.

The Auto Protect feature will be enabled to ensure that any new databases that are created subsequent to backups being enabled will be protected.

 

Using this backup mechanism will allow for reporting on backup status, and provide a faster recovery method compared to the SQL Managed Backup to Storage Blob feature.

CONSTRAINTS

      Backup for SQL VMs support SQL Server 2012, 2014 and 2016.

      Pre-2012 SQL Databases will be backed up with the Azure BM Image based (non-SQL database aware) backup described in section 5.8.2.1.1

      MS SQL Databases that are configured with the simple recovery model cannot backup the transaction log and will have a 24-hour RPO

      MS SQL Databases that require a lower RPO than 24 hours must be configured with Full or Bulk-Logged recovery model.

      Databases with large number of files can't be protected. The maximum number of files that is supported is ~1000.

      Azure Backup supports only Full and Copy-only Full backup types for Read-only databases

      A single Recovery Services Vault can back up to ~2000 SQL Server databases in a vault. Additional vaults will be created should this limit be reached.

        Replication

      Recovery Service Vault

      A Recovery Services Vault within each subscription will also be used to configure Azure Site Recovery for supported workloads that require image-based replication from North Europe to West Europe