Microsoft Azure AZ-801 — Section 11: Manage backup and recovery for windows Server

65. Back up and restore files and folders to Azure Recovery Services vault

Let’s go over now how we can back up and restore data involving the Azure environment. This is going to both involve the fact that we can back up and restore stuff that’s in the cloud as well as on-premises. But we’ve got to get started on how we would even begin doing something like that. So, to do this, you’re going to need what is called a recovery services vault. But before we create a recovery services vault, I’m going to create a storage account, which is where the type of resource the in Azure that allows us to store files and all that fun stuff.

So, we’re going to go here on portal.azure.com, we’re going to click the menu button here and I am going to create a go to resource groups. I was going to create a resource group and I’m going to call it StorageAccountDemo. All right, it’ll be East US. I’m going to click to Create and I’ve now created my resource group, so I’m going to click the Menu button now and I’ll go down here to Storage Accounts and I’m going to click to Create a storage account. Storage account demo is my resource group, which is going to create a storage account called elpstorageacctdemo. And I believe that one should be available. Yep. It would throw an error if it wasn’t stored. Accounts have to be lowercase. East US. Standard. I’m not getting into the intricacies of building storage accounts here. I’m just going to choose the standard and we’ll not do a bunch of redundancy for this and. Anything else here? I don’t believe there’s anything else I need to set up for this. No. All right, so we’re going to review and create. And we’ll click create. So, it’s going to go ahead now and build the storage account.

So, while that’s going on, I’m going to go to this menu button here and I’m going to go to all services and we’re going to do a search for the word recovery. All right. And you will see an option there called Recovery Services Vault. All right. From there, I’m going to go to create a recovery services vault. And we’re going to choose the Resource Group Storage Account Demo, and I’ll just give it a name. Let’s see, RecoveryVaultDemo. East US. We’ll click Review and create, and then we’re going to click to Create. All right. So, we’ve now created a recovery services vault.

So, Recovery Service Vault is a place where we can back up and restore information. While that’s being created, I’m going to go to the menu button and I’m going to go to my storage accounts. And here is our storage account we’ve created. All right. And so from there, I can buy I can create store information if I want. I can do what’s called blob containers. I can do file shares, which is like a file shares is what sort of takes the place of an SMB based file server in Windows. So, I could actually go there to this file shares, click file share and create a file share., maybe, I’ll call it something like images or something, and I’ll click to create this little file share and then I’ll go and click in there. And then from there I can upload some information. So, I’m going to upload I’m going to upload one of my drawings, so we’ll click to do that. All right. So, I just selected my domain cloud image off my computer here and I’m just going to upload that and it’s now officially uploaded. So, that is right there stored in the images folder. And if I wanted to download it all that I can, I can also have a URL that allows people to get access to it. And here’s what it looks like if I download it. So, this is drawing right here. Anyway, I’ve now uploaded some data, so our recovery vault should have completed installing.

So, now I’m going to go to the Menu button. I’m going to go to Resource Groups and go to Storage Account Demo Resource Group. And you’ll notice that I have my recovery vault demo right here. So, I’m going to go in and click on that. All right. And from there, I can go down here to where it says back up. And notice my options so I can back up something. And as where is the workload? So it’s in Azure. Notice I do have an on-premises option, but I’m not going to get into that in this video. But I’m going to go right here and I could choose. I want to back up an Azure file share so I could say back up. All right, storage account. I’m going to back up from my storage account. Let’s see if we can get that to actually show up. There it goes. I don’t know why it wasn’t showing up the first time, but we’ll go ahead and do that. And I’m going to go ahead and click Okay to that. And so we’re choosing that storage account to back stuff up. All right. So, it’s registering the storage account with Recovery Services. Vault tells you that it’ll take just a moment, so I’ll just pause my recording for a second. All right.

Once that’s done, I can add the whatever shares are available. There’s only one share, obviously, and I created. It’s the image images share, and then I could do a backup policy. Now, backup policy is going to be a schedule. All right. I can set a backup schedule, but I’m not going to worry about doing a backup policy right now. I’m just going to leave it as a default and I’m going to click enable backup. And we have now officially set this little backup up in the recovery vault. All right. So, that’s going to go ahead and set this little backup going. And meanwhile, I’m going to jump back over to my recovery vault. And so main thing that’ll happen here, once that’s once it officially gets backup, you’ll have backup items right here. It’ll show you right now, it hasn’t refreshed yet, but once it’s done, you’ll see it appear. Actually, it will appear right here because it will be an Azure storage file. And that’s where you can go and see everything that’s officially been backed up. But all in all, I think you’ll find and this is just kind of the quick glimpse of the Azure Recovery vault right out of the gates here. It’s a pretty easy resource to use in Azure and definitely something that can be valuable in our environment, making sure that we have stuff backed up. And again, it does back up not just Azure but stuff in the on-premises environment, which I’m not explaining in this video, but you will be able to have a lot of flexibility when you use a recovery services vault.

66. Install and manage Azure Backup Server

So, one of the nice things I can do in regards to Azure is I can back data up that’s on-premises up into the Azure Cloud Service and there’s various ways you can do it. But what I want to talk about right now is something called the Microsoft Azure Backup Servers, also known as MABS.

So, here we are on NYC-SVR1 and I’m going to open up my web browser and I am on portal.azure.com. Now, from there I’m going to go to my Recovery services vault. Now, you can also get to that by clicking the menu and going to all services and just searching for the Recovery Services vault. Or if you created one, you can go to your resource group and I’m going to go and click on Recovery Services Vault here. There is my Recovery Services vault right there. And then I’m going to go down to backup. All right. And from there, I’m going to choose on-premises and it asks me what I’m going to be backing up. So, in this case, maybe, I’m going to back up some Hyper-V virtual machines., maybe, I’m back up some files, SQL service, and then I’ve got to prepare my infrastructure. So, in order to do that, it says, all right, you’ve got to have this thing called MABS. It also mentions already using System Center Data Protection manager.  If you’re using that, they’re actually going to tell you that you can use SPM systems and or data protection manager to do backups to Azure as well. So, it’s kind of overkill, but that’s a paid product. MABS is free and costs me anything. So, MABS is the Microsoft Azure Backup Server.

Now, before I go any further, I would like to say something if you are just going to back up some files and that’s all you really wanted to back up, there is an easier way a little. It doesn’t take up as much room and memory and all that stuff if you go here to back up. And you choose on-premises. All right, Let’s just say you’re going to back up files. All right? Real simple. Then there’s another thing called Mars, which is the Microsoft Azure Recovery Service. It’s a very lightweight little backup tool that you can install on servers or clients, and it’ll let you choose to back up just files. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. I just wanted to throw that out there. In my case, let’s go back over here. In my case, I am not just backing up files. I’m wanting to back up things like Hyper-V, virtual machines and, maybe, SQL and things like that. So, I’m going to be having to use MABS because MABS is the only thing that’s going to let me back up those types of things.

So, first thing I do is download the tool. So, we’re going to go ahead and do that. All right, so here’s the little tool. All right. So, System Center, Microsoft Azure Backup Server, the little executable here. And there’s also me binary files that they’ve got available. So, I’ll go ahead and you’ll notice if I select all of these, it’s basically telling me that I’ve got four gigs, 4.2 gigs of data here that’s going to get downloaded in order to get everything right. So, it’s a pretty big, pretty big set of files that we got to download. So, now I’m going to click Next. All right. And at that point. We’re going to begin downloading. All right. And so go ahead and let this thing pull everything and I’ll pause the recording while that’s happening. All right.

So, it looks like it’s done downloading and looking over here and downloads. You can see I have the system Center, Microsoft Azure Server backup or backup server. I’m going to double click on that. It’s going to pop a little wizard up here and I’m going to go ahead and. Tell it to extract and I’ll just pause the recording while it’s extracting. Okay.

Now, that it’s done extracting, we’re going to install it. But there is something we need to install first. We’re going to go to Server Manager here and I’m going to go to add roles and features. We’re going to click Next, next, next, and next. And we’re going to install the.net framework 3.5 features. So, we’re going to go ahead and select that and we’re going to click Next and we’re going to install. All right. So, give that just a moment to install.

Now, that’s done installing, I’m going to reboot my server. So, I’m just going to right click start shut down and click restart. Now, that the server is rebooted, I’m going to open up File Explorer and go to the C drive. We’re going to go to this folder here called System Center, Microsoft Azure Backup Server, and we’re going to go into the next folder underneath and run setup. From there, we’re going to click on Microsoft Azure Backup Server. Okay, here we are on the welcome wizard. I’m just going to click Next and then it’s going to ask me to check for prerequisites. So, I’m going to go ahead and do that. All right. And looks like it passed.

So, we’ll click Next. It’s going to tell us that we are going to need a version of SQL on here. Since I don’t have a version of SQL, it will install one. And you can see kind of the prerequisites right here, but I’m going to click check and install and it looks like everything looked good there. So, we’ll click Next. All right.

So, it’s now telling me that Microsoft Azure Backup Server files will be located in the spot. That’s fine. I’m just going to kind of go with the defaults here. We’re going to click Next. This is like, what do you want your password to be for the Azure Server backup? So it tells you it’s going to basically create a restricted local user account. So, we’ll just give it a password. All right. I’m going to click Next. Says Microsoft updates. Do you want to use Microsoft updates? I’m going to turn that off because I don’t really want to use it right now just to kind of speed things up. Now, I’m going go ahead and click Install. And there you go. It’s now running through the install, so I’ll let that run through. All right. Now, it’s asking me if I’ve got a proxy server. I’m connecting through it. I don’t. So, I’m just going to click Next and I’m going to now click Install and we’ll wait on the rest of these files to get installed.

Now, that is done, I’m going to click Next and it’s initializing the services and then it’s asking me for my vault ID. Now, to get this, we’re going to open up our web browser. We’re going to go back to portal.azure.com, and we need to go to our recovery services vault.

Remember, if you can’t find it, if you’ve created one, you should have a resource group for or you can always go to all services and search for it. We’ll go to Recovery Services Vault. Here is our vault we created. Now, I’m going to go to backup. I’m going to choose on-premises. Choose a Services, Prepare Infrastructure. So, earlier, this is what I clicked, right. But right here, I’m going to go I’ve already downloaded and using the latest server installation, so I’m going to download my vault credentials to register the server.

So, we’re going to click download. All right. And so it is now downloading these vault credentials. We’re just going to. Um. Okay, so they’re in our downloads folder, so we should be able to jump back over here now and click browse and we’re going to go to our downloads folder. There they are.

So, we’ll double click on that and it’s validating those credentials. We’re now going to click Next and we have to enter a passphrase. We can tell it to generate one for us. All right. It’s got to be at least 16 characters, and then it wants to know a location of where we’re going to store this passphrase. They do warn you that storing the past three locally is not a good idea.

So, naturally, I’m just going to store it locally. Actually, in the real world, obviously you want to save that somewhere, like on a different server or something, but it does tell you have select the location the machine to store. The passphrase is exposed as the passphrase of the source machine corruption. Yada, yada, yada. I’m just going to click yes to that and it’s now going to register it and I’ll just pause recording while that’s happening. It finally finished installing. It does take about 15 to 20 minutes, somewhere around there for this to get done. And as you can see, it says that it’s ready to go and I just need to restart it.

So, I’m going to go ahead and tell the computer, tell the server to restart. All right. After the restart, you can see that there are a couple of icons on the desktop. One is the Microsoft Azure Backup Server. That’s the graphical tool. And then you also have a PowerShell, which is called a PowerShell icon, which is the Microsoft Azure Backup Server Management Shell, which gives you access to all the PowerShell commands regarding this. If you ever wanted to script out a bunch of commands for backing up and restoring, you could do that. Well, it’s go into the graphical tool and this is the graphical tool, what it looks like here. And this is we’ve now officially got this installed.

All right. If you’ve ever used any of the system center based products before, this is probably going to look familiar to you. A lot of the different system center products you have, the way they’re kind of laid out, as you have what’s called the ribbon at the top. That’s this area here. Then you have the hierarchical view right here. And then down here, these are called workspaces. So, each one of these is a different workspace. And as you click on these different workspaces, you can see that it changes the hierarchical view and it also changes stuff at the top on the ribbon as well.

So, that’s kind of how it’s laid out. All right. I’m not getting into the intricacies of using this tool in this video, but we’ve now officially got it installed.