Azure Site Recovery – An overview

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Azure Site RecoveryAzure Site Recovery (ASR) is a powerful disaster recovery and business continuity solution provided by Microsoft Azure. It enables businesses to keep their critical applications and services up and running in the event of unexpected downtime, disasters, or disruptions. With ASR, you can replicate your on-premises virtual machines, physical servers, and even entire data centers to Azure, and quickly restore them when needed.

In this blog post, we will dive deep into the capabilities, benefits, and use cases of Azure Site Recovery. We will also explore the key features, architecture, and pricing model of ASR.

Capabilities of Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery provides a range of capabilities that can help businesses ensure high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery. Here are some of the key capabilities of ASR:

  1. Replication: ASR can replicate virtual machines, physical servers, and even entire data centers to Azure. This enables businesses to keep their critical applications and services up and running in the event of unexpected downtime, disasters, or disruptions.
  2. Orchestration: ASR can orchestrate the failover and failback of replicated virtual machines and servers. This ensures that the entire failover process is automated, orchestrated, and monitored.
  3. Testing: ASR provides a non-disruptive way to test disaster recovery scenarios without impacting the production environment. This enables businesses to validate their disaster recovery plans and ensure that they are working as expected.
  4. Integration: ASR integrates with a range of Azure services, including Azure Backup, Azure Monitor, Azure Automation, and Azure Security Center. This enables businesses to have a holistic view of their disaster recovery and business continuity operations.

Benefits of Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery provides a range of benefits to businesses of all sizes and industries. Here are some of the key benefits of ASR:

  1. High availability: ASR enables businesses to achieve high availability of their critical applications and services. This ensures that their customers and employees have access to the applications and services they need, even in the event of unexpected downtime, disasters, or disruptions.
  2. Data protection: ASR ensures that data is protected and can be recovered in the event of data loss or corruption. This is essential for businesses that handle sensitive data or have compliance requirements.
  3. Reduced downtime: ASR can help businesses reduce downtime by providing a fast and efficient way to recover from disasters or disruptions. This can save businesses a significant amount of time, money, and resources.
  4. Simplified disaster recovery: ASR simplifies the disaster recovery process by automating failover and failback operations. This reduces the risk of human error and ensures that the entire process is orchestrated and monitored.
  5. Lower costs: ASR can help businesses reduce their disaster recovery costs by eliminating the need for expensive hardware and infrastructure. This is because businesses can replicate their virtual machines and servers to Azure, which provides a cost-effective disaster recovery solution.

Use cases for Azure Site Recovery

  • Business Continuity: ASR can help businesses ensure business continuity by providing a way to keep their critical applications and services up and running in the event of unexpected downtime, disasters, or disruptions. With ASR, businesses can replicate their on-premises virtual machines and servers to Azure and failover to them in the event of a disaster.
  • Data Protection: ASR can help businesses protect their data by replicating it to Azure and providing a way to recover it in the event of data loss or corruption. With ASR, businesses can set up a replication policy to replicate data to Azure and configure recovery points to restore data to a specific point in time.
  • Migration: ASR can be used to migrate virtual machines and servers from on-premises to Azure. With ASR, businesses can replicate their on-premises workloads to Azure and then failover to the replicated virtual machines in Azure. This can help businesses move their workloads to Azure in a seamless and efficient manner.
  • Testing: ASR provides a non-disruptive way to test disaster recovery scenarios without impacting the production environment. With ASR, businesses can test their disaster recovery plans and ensure that they are working as expected without interrupting their production environment.
  • DevOps: ASR can be used in DevOps scenarios to replicate development and test environments to Azure. This can help businesses reduce the time and cost of setting up and managing these environments. With ASR, businesses can replicate their development and test environments to Azure and then failover to them when needed.
  • Compliance: ASR can help businesses meet compliance requirements by ensuring that their data is protected and can be recovered in the event of data loss or corruption. With ASR, businesses can replicate their data to Azure and then configure recovery points to ensure that their data can be restored to a specific point in time.
  • Hybrid Cloud: ASR can be used in hybrid cloud scenarios to ensure high availability and disaster recovery across on-premises and Azure environments. With ASR, businesses can replicate their on-premises workloads to Azure and then failover to them in the event of a disaster.
  • Multi-Site Disaster Recovery: ASR can be used to provide disaster recovery across multiple sites. With ASR, businesses can replicate their virtual machines and servers to multiple Azure regions and then failover to the replicated virtual machines in the event of a disaster.

In summary, Azure Site Recovery provides a range of capabilities that can help businesses ensure high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery. It can be used in a wide range of use cases across different industries to provide a cost-effective and efficient disaster recovery solution.

Until next time,

Rob

Lessons Learned – Managing your Critical IT Infrastructure during a Pandemic

Worldwide Craziness

The Novel Coronavirus has already devastated the global economy. Historically, most business continuity plans for data centers are based on local scenarios, where “acts of God” wreaked havoc in one place. Rarely had anyone considered that one place being all of Earth.

A Change in IT Mindset

It is not — at least not yet — the equivalent of a worldwide hurricane. Today, the world’s data centers are, for the most part, functional. Modern enterprise data centers have already been designed to operate with as few as three full-time staff members onsite.

You don’t have to look far to see how the global COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally upended IT. As organizations in all sectors have rapidly emptied their offices and sent their employees home to comply with ever more expansive shelter-in-place and quarantine mandates, replicating the full breadth of services remotely has been IT’s biggest priority.

All of this is nothing short of a remote collaboration revolution. It is already rewriting how work gets done — and how technology gets supported — when direct access to traditional, physical infrastructure is no longer a given.

But this is merely one aspect of IT. As we begin to digest how these changes will shape technology best practices, both during the current crisis and well into the future, we can’t afford to ignore the often unseen underpinnings of IT infrastructure that don’t have the luxury of working remotely.

Not an Option

Put merely, mission-critical facilities like data centers can’t be relocated into employees’ home offices. While transferring end-user productivity out of a traditional office context is a fairly straightforward process. The same can’t be said for the highly specialized workloads that can only be managed within the framework of a data center. Beyond the uniquely visible and non-transferrable capabilities of the facilities themselves — grid access, raw compute power, failover, security, etc. — there is the genuine accountability associated with the sheer volume and type of workloads managed within them.

Regulatory constraints around how incalculably vital data must be managed and protected throughout all phases of its lifecycle add even more complexity to data center protocols during a pandemic.

So while you can’t simply abandon your data center in the same manner as your end users have cleared out their offices, you can — and must — understand how to rebalance your provision of data center services in light of how the pandemic continues to evolve. And it would be best if you did so while you continue to keep the lights on for stakeholders who need uninterrupted access to data center services now more than ever.

Against this backdrop, if you haven’t already examined your data center management strategy through a COVID-19 lens, now is the time to do so. As with anything related to the data center, however, this will be a complex, multifaceted process. It would be best if you positioned yourself to navigate it by looking at it through the following contexts.

  • Capacity Management

    The historically unpredictable global business environment is putting unprecedented pressure on capacity management, with businesses barely able to forecast demand — or, in many cases, keep up with it. Global internet traffic is trending upward, with several exchanges routinely reaching record throughput as entire economies and workforces adjust to the new lockdown paradigm. Some organizations facing spiking demand have no choice but to move services out of their own data centers and lean more heavily on vendors. This makes absolute sense in an unpredictable landscape where scale needs to be implemented without delay. Still, it doesn’t make everyday issues like bandwidth, power, CPU, memory, and disk space disappear. Instead, it shifts the burden onto these external providers and their specific infrastructure. IT leadership must adapt these partnerships to keep pace because, if vendors don’t stay ahead of the curve, IT may find itself unable to serve the business adequately.

  • Connectivity

    The old truth to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket has never been more valid than it is now. This issue relates directly to capacity management, and, as the crisis deepens, the strain on all aspects of infrastructure will only increase. Diversify your upstream providers as much as possible to mitigate the risks associated with any one of them being compromised by pandemic-related resourcing constraints. This minimizes the potential for back-end interruptions to reach your customers. Leverage third-party user reviews and analyst resources to better assess and compare vendors, match provider capabilities to fast-changing business needs, and position yourself to make best-of-breed decisions faster.

  • Disaster Recovery

    The uptick in adopting mission-critical services being deployed off-premises doesn’t only impact day-to-day service delivery and the service level agreements (SLAs) that set expectations and confirm accountabilities. It also has significant implications for disaster recovery (DR) planning and implementation. It shifts a fair degree of risk over to the third-party providers now responsible for delivering these services. DR plans must be updated to reflect this new world of vendor-distributed work, and vendors must be integral to this process to ensure they are in a position to fulfill all requirements.

  • Security

    Cybercriminals have never missed an opportunity to take advantage of periods of uncertainty to ply their evil trade, and the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. As more organizations move their services to centralized locations, bad actors suddenly have significantly more — and better defined — higher-value targets. From a cybercriminal’s perspective, why attack one company and net only one victim when you can strike a mission-critical data center and compromise many victims? This sobering reality reinforces the need to nail down end-to-end security protocols with all vendors, including, but not limited to, encryption, authentication, and onsite access control. Reaffirming your cybersecurity skills inventory — and closing any gaps with targeted training — should also be prioritized.

  • Colocation

    If you are either using or responsible for colocated resources or infrastructure, you must take immediate steps to reduce physical risks at all levels, including:

    • Focus on disease control and disinfection throughout the facility.
    • Enforce monitoring — including temperature checks — at tightly controlled entries, and turn away anyone exhibiting symptoms to avoid compromising the facility itself.
    • Reduce the number of people onsite, especially unknowns and other individuals not considered essential to the business.
    • Consider extending shift lengths from eight to 12 hours and moving to a two-shift schedule, if local labor laws will accommodate.
    • Take individual steps to protect technical staff with skills required to maintain data center uptime, including sequestering them in a third, unscheduled shift, and holding them in reserve if primary staff exhibit symptoms.
    • Incorporate in-person monitoring of tasks during shift rotations to ensure continuity of operations. Implement contactless handovers to minimize transmission risk during these critical periods.
    • Assign activities and technical resources to single buildings and prevent them from moving to other buildings within a more massive campus.
    • Prioritize the implementation of “smart hands” services to ensure trained, known resources handle tasks requiring onsite engagement.
    • Leverage guidance from local and regional health authorities to ensure nothing is missed, including physical traffic control methods in shared areas to support social distancing.

Focus on the Opportunity

Not everything about the current pandemic should incite fear — all significant disruptions offer opportunities to rethink how data center operations are planned, managed, and evolved over time. The possibilities can be game-changing, but only if you take the time to get out of firefighting mode and zero in on what your strategy should look like once COVID-19 is firmly behind us.

For example, as more data physically moves offsite toward data centers, hardware GPUs can be leveraged for compute-intensive artificial intelligence, machine learning, and related data analysis applications. Recognize that data has gravity and tends to pull surrounding apps with it. Position yourself to sell compute capacity to meet these shifting demands.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

As the pandemic continues to play out, expect the value of traditional data center best practice to be reinforced. This isn’t so much a time to rip apart and rebuild as it is to validate what you’ve been doing all along and double down on it.

Start by ensuring your basics are sound and that your existing slate of products and services is reliable, secure, and well-communicated to your stakeholders. The sudden increase in demand for data center services and capacity may be unique in history, but stakeholders will depend on you having a firm foundation. By taking the time to reaffirm that this is indeed the case, you’re in a much better position to scale and meet this demand.

Learn from experience

As unique as this experience seems to us all, recognize that we’ve been through this before — including the SARS, H1N1, and Ebola outbreaks in 2003, 2009, and 2014, respectively. Refer back to any documentation you may have from those periods to inform your thinking and responses for the current pandemic, but bear in mind that the impact in those previous cases was significantly smaller, and we “returned to normal” much more quickly.

This time out, the impact is unprecedented, and the future timeline won’t be resolving itself anytime soon. Expect it to take far longer than initially expected to return to anything remotely approaching “normal,” and, even then, expect the very definition of the word to evolve.

Many economic, technological, and social changes will indeed be permanent, which means your go-forward strategy to manage data center resources should not be to overutilize what you’ve got and hope to ride out the storm. Instead, now is the time to scale your investments in critical infrastructure and prepare for a changing world after that. This strategy will maximize your business continuity and minimize the risks associated with navigating these strange times.

Until next time, Rob.

Windows Virtual Desktop now in the Wild – Public Preview Now Available

The Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) product and strategy announced last September is finally here in public preview.  Something near and dear to my heart for the last 6 months.  I’ve been in private preview and had to keep a lid on it 🙂 Yea!!

What is it?

Simply put, it’s multi-session Windows 10 experience with optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops. It means users can deploy and scale Windows desktops on Azure and on-premise quickly.

The service brings together single-user Windows 7 VDI and multi-user Windows 10 and Windows Server RDS and is hosted on any of Azure’s virtual machine tiers or what you could call DaaS (Desktop as a Service) in a way.

Licensing

Microsoft is pricing WVD aggressively by charging only for the virtual machine costs; the license requirements for the Windows 7 and Windows 10 based services will be fulfilled by Microsoft 365 F1/E3/E, Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5, and Windows VDA subscriptions. The Windows Server-based services are similarly fulfilled by existing RDS client access licenses. This means that for many Microsoft customers, there will be no additional licensing cost for provisioning desktop computing in the cloud.

The virtual machine costs can be further reduced by using Reserved Instances that commit to purchasing certain amounts of VM time in return for lower pricing.  All of this just means simpler licensing for Office and Windows as opposed to the crazy license models of the past.  I am not saying that crazy licensing models are gone but have gotten much simpler.

What’s the deal with Windows 7 and Support?

The new service will be available to the production environments in the by June before Windows 7 support ends in January 2020.

But, there is a big incentive, Windows 7 users will receive all three years of Extended Security Updates (ESU) at no extra cost. This should ease the cost of migration to the service; this is in contrast to on-premises deployments that will cost either $25/$50/$100 for the three years of ESU availability or $50/$100/$200, depending on the precise Windows license being used.

WVD and O365

WVD will also provide particular benefits for Office 365 users. In November last year, Microsoft bought a company called FSLogix that develops software to streamline application provisioning in virtualized environments.

Outlook (with its offline data store) and OneDrive (with its synchronized file system) represent particular challenges for virtual desktops, as both applications store large amounts of data on the client machine.  This data is expected to persist across VM reboots and redeployments. FSLogix’s software allows these things to be stored on separate disk images that are seamlessly grafted onto the deployed virtual machine. WVD will use this software for clients running Office 365, but this can be optional.

Liquidware and WVD

The technology of ProfileUnity and FlexApp only complement what Microsoft includes with FSLogix.  But do understand, if you need a simple soution for Profile Disk, then FSlogix is the way to go and save yourself some money. Over my next few blog posts, I plan to show how to set up WVD and a full walk-through of FSLogix running with WVD.

Sizing WVD?

Liquidware has a product called Stratusphere UX. It’s an EUC monitoring tool that allows you to properly size your Azure environment for WVD. This helps make smart decisions on migrations to WVD.  It doesn’t stop there, Stratusphere provides ongoing metrics and alerting that help IT Pro’s to continue to maintain a high performing WVD environment into the future.

How do I get it?

Azure Market Place 🙂 The preview is available in the US East 2 and US Central Azure regions; When GA is announced, it will be available in all regions.

In Microsoft’s eyes, its time to kickass and take names 😉

Check out my next post on WVD and FSLogix.

Until next time, Rob

The Microsoft Cloud: A Complete Picture

If you’re looking to learn more about Microsoft cloud, including how your organization could benefit from it, you’re in the right place. This comprehensive guide covers the basics and beyond, from “What is Microsoft cloud?”, to services and security.

Feel free to skip to the parts you’re most interested in by using the table of contents below. If you have any questions after reading, don’t hesitate to get in touch—I’m happy to provide clarification and answer any of your questions.

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Azure Stack 101: The Definitive Introduction

Azure Stack

Microsoft’s Azure Stack is an excellent toolset that allows enterprises to run a hybrid cloud right in their own datacenters, giving them additional cloud options.

But to really use it to its best advantage, IT pros should know the ins and outs of Azure Stack so they can use it within their business IT infrastructures to better manage, speed up and control their Azure cloud deployments and workloads.

A good place to start is with a primer on Azure Stack itself to give business users a broad look at what’s under the hood of their IT infrastructure.

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What Is Hyper-V? The Authoritative Guide

hyper-v

What Is Hyper-V? [Definition & Uses For It]

Whether you’re just beginning to look into virtualization platform options for your company, or you’re a new Hyper-V user trying to get up to speed, it can be a challenge to find all the information you need in one place. That’s why I created this guide—to give you an all-in-one resource you can bookmark and refer back to as often as you need to, so you can get up and running on Hyper-V more smoothly. Continue reading