Creating Recovery Services Vault – Data Protection

Creating Recovery Services Vault – Data Protection

When you configure Backup, the data gets stored inside an entity called Recovery Services vaults. You can back up data for various Azure services like Azure Virtual Machines (Linux or Windows) and Azure SQL Databases. For on-premises, Recovery Services vaults support System Center DPM, Windows Server, Azure Backup Server, and other services. Backing up to Recovery Services vaults helps you track, audit, organize, and manage multiple servers in a centralized console, while reducing the management overhead.

In the Azure portal, you can search for Recovery Services vault, and you can create a vault by following these steps:

1. Search for Recovery Services vaults in the Azure portal and click Recovery Services Vaults. Click Create.
2. To create the vault, all you need to provide is the subscription, resource group, vault name, and region, as shown in Figure 10.1. The region selection is crucial as you cannot back up VMs that are deployed in a different region.
3. Click Review + Create and wait for the validation to get completed. Once the validation is done, you can click Create to create the vault.

FIGURE 10.1 Creating a Recovery Services vault

One thing to note here is that when a new Recovery Services vault is created, it’s created with georedundant storage. If you are not planning to use this redundancy and would like to optimize the cost, then consider changing the redundancy before you back up any service. Once you onboard any solution, then you cannot alter the redundancy. Now that you have created the vault, let’s see the set of services or offerings that can be backed up to this vault. The solutions can span the cloud and on-premises.

Configuring a Recovery Services Vault

Though you can use the Recovery Services vault for backing up several solutions, since we are exploring file and folder backup, we will focus only on those offerings.

Talking about Azure services, to back up files and folders stored in Azure Files, you can use Recovery Service vaults. Along with file shares, you can see other options (refer to Figure 10.2); however, we will talk about this when we discuss virtual machine backups.

When you switch your source to On-Premises, you see a longer list (refer to Figure 10.3) than just options for Azure. You can see Files And Folders, along with other supported services.

FIGURE 10.2 Backup options for Azure

FIGURE 10.3 Backup options for on-premises

Within an Azure subscription, you can create up to 25 Recovery Services vaults per region. When you are working with backups for solutions in Azure, it’s seamless as the solutions are natively deployed in Azure. However, working with on-premises may require a couple more steps for implementation. For example, configuring a backup for on-premises files and folders requires multiple steps. The following are the steps required to back up on-premises files and folders to an Azure Recovery Services vault:

Deploy a Recovery Service Vault  Because you need to store the data in Azure, you need to create a Recovery Service vault.

Download the Agent and Credentials File  The Azure Backup agent needs to be installed on-premises on any Windows Server VM or physical server. The agent is responsible for executing the backup from the on-premises infrastructure. Along with the agent, you need to download a credentials file. The credentials file is used by the agent to identify the vault to which it needs to back up. Once you select File And Folders, as shown in Figure 10.3, the next screen gives you the option to download the agent and credentials (refer to Figure 10.4).

Register the Agent  After installing the agent on the on-premises machine, you need to register the agent. The installer provides a wizard that gives step-by-step instructions. During the process, you will specify the installation location, proxy server (if any), and credential information. Successful registration of the agent requires the credential file.

Configure a Backup Policy  You can use the agent to configure the backup policy that contain details such as when to back up, what to back up, retention period, etc.

FIGURE 10.4 Downloading the agent and credentials

As you can see, the backup is orchestrated using the agent. The agent is called the Microsoft Recovery Services agent (MARS agent), and this needs to be installed on the Windows server or client. At the time of writing this book, Linux machines are not supported. The following are the features of the MARS agent:

• Backup files and folders on Windows physical or virtual machines. These VMs can be in Azure, on-premises, or in other cloud provider.
• No additional backup servers are required.
• Volume-level restore only, not aware of application.
• Backup and restore contents are orchestrated using an agent.