VM Data Backup and Failover Options

[Tammy Schwark]

Hello all,

Please excuse my lack of experience in Azure with this question - I am far more comfortable with O365!  

Okay so in addition to O365 we have two VM's in Azure...both running Windows Server...one hosting SQL/custom program...the other QuickBooks Enterprise...pretty straight forward.

Two things I need guidance with please:

1. I want to ensure that the data on both VM's is backed up - after doing some research I see the Azure Backup option - but I also see the Recovery Services vaults - not quite sure which option to go with although it sounds like MS is pushing towards Recovery Services.  Instructions to configure this look straight forward and appears to suit our needs to backup the data but again just want to confirm this is the correct solution.
2. What VM failover options are available?  Let's say one VM (hosting QuickBooks) becomes unavailable - what failover options are available?  If someone can please point me in the right direction I can go from there!  Management might choose to just go for the "backup" option - worst case this VM goes down I provision a new one - install QuickBooks - and restore the QB company files from backup.  I will let them decide but want to present all options - they have already indicated that a day or two of downtime for this VM is "okay".  

Thank you so much for any info/links you can provide!

Cheers!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Tammy

There are 2 options for backup:
VMBackup provides kopies of the VHD that you can manually restore to a new VM or just recover the disks to a storage account.

Recovery Services for you azure VM's are now in preview, this is excellent if you have business critical needs, that in the event MS would loose a Datacenter, you could have replicated VM's and a recovery plan in-place to be up and running much faster and then still have to option to fail back once the primary datacenter returns.

As for you fail over question, you need to use a Loadbalancer.
This load balancer will have its own ip and use's tcp or http probes to detect node health,
the benefit about http, is you can use Custom health probes that return CPU usage, Memory or what ever you can write your way out of.

Edit: Also consider using automation to reduce costs if you dont wish to have both node running at the same time, if you need more VM's overtime i would also consider VM Scale sets, but this requires a bit more technical configuration, the VM's need to be Generelized and configured automatically apon start up.

[#3]

Thank you very much for this info Kent - it is most appreciated!  I shall look into all a bit further and then run options by Management.....

I look forward to learning more about Azure!

Cheers!

Tammy