Kevinsul's Azure Site Recovery Musings https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/kevinsul_blog/feed.xml My blog devoted to my current role at MSFT - Azure Site Recovery in all of its wonder! Tue, 16 Apr 2019 06:09:30 GMT en-US hourly 1 Latest Azure Site Recovery LyncUp – Hosted by Me!!! https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/kevinsul_blog/latest-azure-site-recovery-lyncup-hosted-by-me Thu, 02 Apr 2015 07:50:19 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinsul_blog/2015/04/02/latest-azure-site-recovery-lyncup-hosted-by-me/ Starting earlier this month, my team and I have been conducting regular ‘LyncUp’ sessions where every Monday we focus on a specific aspect for ASR.  Last Monday’s session focused on the new VMware/Physical Server DR capabilities that just went into Preview last week.

To learn more and get the ASR LyncUp sessions on your calendar, go here.  To see the recording of my session from this Monday, go here.

]]> Azure Site Recovery for VMware and Physical Servers is now available as Public Preview! https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/kevinsul_blog/azure-site-recovery-for-vmware-and-physical-servers-is-now-available-as-public-preview Thu, 26 Mar 2015 12:21:03 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinsul_blog/2015/03/26/azure-site-recovery-for-vmware-and-physical-servers-is-now-available-as-public-preview/ Hooray!

Go here for details:  https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/03/26/announcing-the-preview-of-disaster-recovery-for-vmwarephysical-servers-to-microsoft-azure-with-asr/

Go here (and all the way to the bottom to get signed up:  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/preview/

]]> ASR + Azure Traffic Manager + Azure Automation = Better Together! https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/kevinsul_blog/asr-azure-traffic-manager-azure-automation-better-together Fri, 06 Feb 2015 13:06:54 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinsul_blog/2015/02/06/asr-azure-traffic-manager-azure-automation-better-together/ The following demonstration shows an example of how one can architect a failover solution for a multi-tiered application from an on-premises environment to Azure (and back).  Azure Site Recovery provides us the ability to orchestrate failover of servers that make up a specific application.  I have implemented the freely available BlogEngine.NET blog application to represent the application to be failed over.  In this simple example, I have one web frontend running the BlogEngine web tier and a SQL server placed on a separate SQL server as the backend.  What I show is that it is possible to fully automate the planned, unplanned, and test failover of this application from its current on-premises environment to Azure.  With the additional help of a few other awesome Azure services, namely, Azure Traffic Manager and Azure Automation, I am able to provide a very clean and automatic redirection to the ‘new’ home of the application when failover happens which minimizes the disruption of the application to the end-user.  And since ASR provides true failover capabilities, I am able to also failback to the on-premises environment if I so desire – again, minimizing disruption of service to the end-user.  That is, no manual intervention necessary.

The following diagram illustrates my demo environment that I walkthrough in my video here.

BE-demo

]]> Migration Accelerator now supports Linux… https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/kevinsul_blog/migration-accelerator-now-supports-linux Tue, 13 Jan 2015 11:42:18 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinsul_blog/2015/01/13/migration-accelerator-now-supports-linux/ We just updated the current preview release of the Migration Accelerator to also allow the migration of Linux VM’s and physical Linux servers.  Details here.

]]> DPM Now Supports Windows Server 2012 R2 Deduplication https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/kevinsul_blog/dpm-now-supports-windows-server-2012-r2-deduplication Tue, 06 Jan 2015 06:01:01 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinsul_blog/2015/01/06/dpm-now-supports-windows-server-2012-r2-deduplication/ This is ‘kinda’ a big deal.  Well, really, a very big deal, IMO.  Check out the blog announcement here.  In short, if you use VHDX files as the DPM storage pool disks and place those VHDX files on an SMB 3.0 SOFS cluster with the underlying volumes deduplicated, you can now accomplish this.  Combine this with the ability to leverage Azure Backup for long term retention and you have one nice and efficient backup and recovery solution to augment one nice and efficient DR solution based on ASR.  Neat.

]]> New Microsoft Virtual Academy Series on Business Continuity ‘stuff’ https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/kevinsul_blog/new-microsoft-virtual-academy-series-on-business-continuity-stuff Mon, 05 Jan 2015 06:22:55 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinsul_blog/2015/01/05/new-microsoft-virtual-academy-series-on-business-continuity-stuff/ Hello and Happy New Year!  I hope everyone had a good holiday/start to the new year.  Over the break, we released a set of Level 300 modules focused on our Business Continuity solutions.  This includes information and demonstration of how we do HA, Data Protection, and my favorite, Site Recovery.  Anyone can go here to consume these – no signup/registration required.

]]> Using the Microsoft Migration Accelerator to migrate production workloads to Azure for testing… https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/kevinsul_blog/using-the-microsoft-migration-accelerator-to-migrate-production-workloads-to-azure-for-testing Sun, 14 Dec 2014 15:51:03 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinsul_blog/2014/12/14/using-the-microsoft-migration-accelerator-to-migrate-production-workloads-to-azure-for-testing/ Hopefully you know by now that we released the preview version of the Microsoft Migration Accelerator (and if not, feel free to check it out at here).  With MMA, it is possible to migrate VMware VM’s, Hyper-V VM’s, AWS VM’s, and even physical Windows servers to Azure.   So with MMA we have the ability to migrate workloads from most any environment to Azure and the plan is that we will soon have the ability to move workloads back as well which will allow the delivery of a true Disaster Recovery solution encompassing a wide spectrum of environments.  However, I believe there is also a nice side benefit to the MMA and the upcoming DR solution and that is the ability to bring up an OS and Application consistent replica of a distributed application to an isolated lab network for the purposes of testing and troubleshooting without disrupting the production deployment form which it came from.  Even better when that isolated lab network exists on something like Azure which allows for on-demand compute, network, and storage services.  I created a short demonstration video to show the MMA in action in this type of scenario.  If you have a free 17 minutes and 33 seconds (or at least 8 minutes and 46.5 seconds if you are like me and watch these type of things in ‘Fast’ mode), feel free to check it out here.

]]> My favorite places to go to get primed on what ASR can do… https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/kevinsul_blog/my-favorite-places-to-go-to-get-primed-on-what-asr-can-do Fri, 05 Dec 2014 09:06:27 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinsul_blog/2014/12/05/my-favorite-places-to-go-to-get-primed-on-what-asr-can-do/ The following are what I have found to be the best places to go to learn, evaluate, and test our Azure Site Recovery solution.  I figured others might find this list of resources useful as well…

  • There were several good ASR sessions conducted at TechEd Europe.  The following are links to these recorded sessions on Channel 9:
]]> Kevinsul has changed roles… https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/kevinsul_blog/kevinsul-has-changed-roles Tue, 18 Nov 2014 14:34:54 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinsul_blog/2014/11/18/kevinsul-has-changed-roles/ After many years as a Datacenter TSP, I have moved to one of the most exciting groups within our field organization known as Incubation.  In Incubation, I will be focused on our Azure Site Recovery solutions.  Stay tuned to this spot as I plan to resurrect this blog with all sorts of ramblings surrounding my work in this area!

]]> Fun with Hyper-V Replica in WS2012 RC https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/kevinsul_blog/fun-with-hyper-v-replica-in-ws2012-rc Thu, 21 Jun 2012 08:44:46 GMT https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/kevinsul_blog/2012/06/21/fun-with-hyper-v-replica-in-ws2012-rc/ The other day, I was messing around with the new Hyper-V Replica feature in my lab.  I quickly came to the conclusion that although it is nice to be able to right-click on a VM in the Hyper-V MMC to initiate a failover, it would be even better if I had to a way to simply failover all Replica-enabled VM’s from one host to the other with a single action.  And so I developed the attached Orchestrator runbook to do just that.  About as simple as you can get.  To run, you simply need to feed in which Hyper-V host you are failing over FROM and then which Hyper-V host you are failing TO.  It then takes those parameters and feeds them into a relatively simple PS script which gets all of the VM’s that are enabled for HVR and for each of them, turns them off, prepares them for failover, fails them over, and finally turns them on upon the host your are failing TO.  The script looks like this (and is of course embedded in the ois_export file):

 

image

…and as you can see, I do little to no error-checking or verification so the assumption is that each VM with HVR enabled has a replica on the same host you are failing TO.  Also would be nice to verify that the VM is in a good state prior to trying to replicate but I simply didn’t do that but this could be easily modified. 

And to make it more user-friendly, I integrated this runbook with a Service Manager Service Request so that one can simply go to the SMPortal SR page to get this kicked off:

image

IMO, a pretty flexible yet easy to implement way to provide automated site recovery services management…

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