What’s Azure Recovery Services Vaults and How it’s work?
When you have many VMs with SQL databases, we tirelessly need to go to each VMs and backup the databases. When you have a few VMs that may not be an issue. But what if you deploy dozens or hundreds of VMs and you need to backup and restore databases? That becomes tedious.
To resolve this, we have the Recovery Services vaults, a storage entity in Azure that houses data.
What does Azure Backup do?
Azure Backup protects data, machine state, and workloads on both on-premises machines and Azure virtual machines (VMs).
How does Azure Backup work?
- On-premises Machines:
Windows machines can be backed up directly to Azure using the Azure Backup MARS agent, but Linux machines are not supported.
Alternatively, you can back up these machines to a backup server (System Center Data Protection Manager or Microsoft Azure Backup Server) and then transfer the backup to an Azure Recovery Services vault.
- Azure VMs:
Azure VMs can be backed up directly by installing a backup extension to the VM agent, which backs up the whole VM.
Specific files and folders can be backed up using the MARS agent.
Azure VMs can also be backed up to a MABS running in Azure, which can then be backed up to a Recovery Services vault.
Where is data backed up?
Azure Backup stores backed-up data in vaults — Recovery Services vaults and Backup vaults. A vault is an online-storage entity in Azure that’s used to hold data, such as backup copies, recovery points, and backup policies.
Vaults have the following features:
- Vaults make it easy to organize your backup data, while minimizing management overhead.
- You can monitor backed-up items in a vault, including Azure VMs and on-premises machines.
- You can manage vault access with Azure RBAC.
- You specify how data in the vault is replicated for redundancy:
- Locally redundant storage (LRS): To protect your data against server rack and drive failures, you can use LRS. LRS replicates your data three times within a single data center in the primary region. LRS provides at least 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability of objects over a given year.
- Geo-redundant storage (GRS): To protect against region-wide outages, you can use GRS. GRS replicates your data to a secondary region.
- Zone-redundant storage (ZRS): replicates your data in Availability zones, guaranteeing data residency and resiliency in the same region.
- By default, Recovery Services vaults use GRS.
- In each Azure subscription, you can create up to 500 vaults.
Recovery Services vaults make it easy to organize your backup data, while minimizing management overhead.
Recovery Services vaults features such as:
· Secure backup data by providing secure protect cloud backups;
· Central monitoring to monitor Azure VMs and on-premises from a central portal;
· Soft Delete, so backup data is retained for 14 additional days allowing the recovery of that backup item with no data loss. The additional 14 days of retention for backup don’t incur any cost;
· Cross Region Restore (CRR) allows you to restore Azure VMs in a secondary region, which is an Azure paired region. If Azure declares a disaster in the primary region, the data replicated in the secondary region is available to restore in the secondary region;
· By default, the data is replicated using Geo replication. You can change this to Local to save costs, BUT in a prod environment, we need to keep Geo.
How to use Recovery Services Vaults?
Using this feature as easy as taking candy from a baby. Let’s do it!
- Access Azure Portal and search for Recovery Services Vaults
- Create a Recovery Services Vaults
- Navigate to Backup session, select your environment workload, and select what do you want backup.
At our example we will select SQL Server in Azure VM
- Start Discovering your BDs in Virtual Machine to backup
- Select what VM you want configure and click on Discovery DB’s
- Configure Backup Policy as you need, and select Add Databases to backup
- Then, enable your backup!
- Now, you can check your configuration
- As you can see, your backup is pending, but you can start it manually
- To see progress of backups, you can access Backups Jobs
Now your Dbs are safety!!! But, how to restore it if needed? Let’s check it!
How to restore a Database from Recovery Services Vault?
- Select Restore on Backup Item menu
- Here you can select where and how restore your databases
- Select what backup you want at Restore Point
- At Advanced Configuration you can set some directory target and restore with NORECOVERY to plus Log backups
- You can follow your restore operation in Backup Jobs
- Here are our database restored!
The Recovery Services Vault in Azure offers an effective way to back up and protect your data. It acts as a central place to store backups from both on-premises systems and Azure virtual machines. By using the Recovery Services Vault, you can automate backups, keep data for long periods, and ensure that your backups are stored securely. This service helps make backup management and disaster recovery easier, ensuring that your important data is safe from loss or system issues. In summary, the Recovery Services Vault is essential for keeping your data secure and reliable in a cloud environment.
