Recovery Services Vault

• Recovery Services vault is a resource that hold backup data.
• It must be in the same region as the VM
• An extension must be installed to the VM. This extension is used to take snapshots of the disks attached to the VM
• To backup a VM, go to the VM resource -> Operations -> Backup
• Possible backups -> Virtual Machine, FileShare, SQL Server, SAP Hana

Backup policy

• Backup policy is used to configure the schedule for the backup process.
• E.g., everyday, retention period, etc
• DefaultPolicy is daily with 30 days retention

Recover points

• A snapshot creates a recovery point
• A backup is composed of multiple recovery points

Kinds of recovery:

• File recovery: Mounts the backup to your personal pc and you can pick the files you want
• VM recovery: Create a new VM based on the backup or replace existing VM. A storage account to crete the OS disk, then the OS disk is attached to a VM.
• Disk recovery: Just the disk is restored

Snapshots

Kinds of snapshots:

• Application consistent: Captures the memory content and the state of applications
• Filesystem consistent: Captures all the files at the same time
• Crash consistent: Happens if the VM shuts down at the backup process

Soft deletes

• Soft delete protects backup data from accidental deletes
• Enables you to recover blobs that were previously marked for deletetion
• Keep deleted blobs for 14 days (parametrized)
• Enabled/disabled in recovery service vault properties

Agent

• The agent is the machine which will run the backup workload
• The agent is run in Azure by default, but can also be run on-premises
• For on-premise agent, the recovery service agent must be downloaded (MARS agent)

Azure Site Recovery

• When a Site Recovery is performed, the VM continuously replicates onto a different region

• If outage occurs, you can failover the VM onto a secondary region

• Replication policy

• Recovery point retention set to 24 hours (how long to keep the recovery points)
• App-consistent snapshot to every 4 hours

• The VMs recovered by failover will not automatically be assigned a new public IP

Diagnostic settings

• Option to log the backup report into log analytics, storage account or event hub
• Reports are shown under backup reports tab