Azure Virtual Machines recovery scenarios - Windows Server Tutorial

- [Instructor] Azure Virtual Machines Recovery Scenarios. This chapter follows directly on the heels of the previous chapter. Specifically, here, we look at restore operations for Azure virtual machines. The first option is a recovering an entire VM, both at storage and configuration to another virtual network. So this is a case where your primary virtual machine, who knows, be catastrophically damaged or maybe the region is unavailable. It could be a platform issue with Azure, but you may need to restore the entire VM. Now you have a choice. Are you going to try to restore the VM in-place or are you going to do, say, a trial restores? This is a common thing that I hope you and your team are doing. These are so-called fire drills, where you practice automating a restore process, say, to a disaster recovery virtual network. And in that case, you can verify, number one, that you and your team know how to do the operation. And number two, you can verify the workflow of bringing up the VM and so on. In this scenario, the restored virtual machine will come up with a separate private IP address. You would probably want to duplicate your production VNet and use the same subnet in a private IP layout, because if it's a production VM, you want to get it up and running. But then again, I do want to mention the other half of the recovery services vault and that's the Azure site recovery or ASR feature. We are going to cover ASR in the next chapter. We use ASR to do failover recovery. With Azure backup, you restore an entire virtual machine to, say, a different virtual network. You have to remember that with these restore operations, no matter what, you are going to have downtime because you have to stop and deallocate the source VM. When you are using Azure site recovery, you are replicating a live Azure VM or frankly, a machine on-premises into a disaster recovery environment. And then you can perform a live failover to that DR environment. Now, one novel point is, what if we do, in fact, want to keep the original VM in place? We don't want to delete it and recreate it because if you have worked with Azure VMs for any length of time, you know that there are plenty of dependencies. You might have a public IP attached to the network interface. You might have a lot of other specialized network interface configurations, network security groups, custom DNS and so on. So we have got this option in the Recovery Services vault, called in-Place restore where you can basically swap out just the storage. That would keep the VM resourced in its configuration, and dependencies in place. This is very convenient indeed. Now, you would still need to stop and deallocate the VM, so you are going to have downtime. This is not Azure Site Recovery, but it can dramatically reduce complexity if nothing else, in a catastrophic restore scenario. Now, the second option, of course, particularly one that comes up in a practice is well, okay, I can restore the VM to an alternate location. And we talked about restoring the disk storage and the VM configuration. But what if I want to provide an alternate configuration? Here is a flow. You want to make sure that you have got a storage account ready to go and capture this process. And you will actually just restore the disks. So we'll just restore, not the full VM, but just the disk storage. And those disks and the VM configuration will be placed into that storage account, where you can fetch the underlying Azure resource manager deployment template. And the idea here, that you then modify that ARM template and then deploy the VM using that modified template. Now you can do all of that with Azure PowerShell, but I will show you in the demo, you can do most of this work in the Azure portal itself. For our exam purposes, you just need to know this top level flow. I will go deeper later in the demo. Now lastly, if you have need for just recovering individual file system artifacts from a backup snapshot, we can do that. So let's say you have got Windows or Linux VM and Azure. That's a file server, for example, or running other workloads. Now, for file server scenarios, I hope you are using the storage sync file service. But anyway, let's say you have files and resources on that VM and therefore, in the snapshot, the production VM. Maybe the files have been deleted or corrupted, I hope not, but let's say. You don't necessarily have to replace the disk or restore the disk to another location and mount it to get into it. There is a fine recovery feature that uses some really clever engineering that we will cover in the upcoming demo that allows you to extract individual files from a backup snapshot. Now, you have seen all the restore operations available for Azure virtual machines.