Why do we need Azure site recovery when we have azure storage replication? One point that I understood is that you can manually failover in case of azure site recovery. Doesn't Azure storage replication replicate all kind of data including VHD?
Thanks In Advance
Azure Storage Replication: It is specifically for Azure Storage (data stored on storage) E.g vhds), it copies your data so that it is protected from planned and unplanned events ranging from transient hardware failures, network or power outages, massive natural disasters, and so on. You can choose to replicate your data within the same data center, across zonal data centers within the same region, and even across regions.
Whereas Azure Site Recovery contributes to your business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy, by orchestrating and automating replication of Azure VMs between regions, on-premises virtual machines and physical servers to Azure, and on-premises machines to a secondary datacenter.
What can Site Recovery protect?
Azure VMs: Site Recovery can replicate any workload running on a
supported Azure VM.
Hyper-V virtual machines: Site Recovery can protect any workload
running on a Hyper-V VM.
Physical servers: Site Recovery can protect physical servers running
Windows or Linux.
VMware virtual machines: Site Recovery can protect any workload
running in a VMware VM.
What workloads can I protect with Site Recovery?
You can use Site Recovery to protect most workloads running on a supported VM or physical server. Site Recovery provides support for application-aware replication, so that apps can be recovered to an intelligent state. It integrates with Microsoft applications such as SharePoint, Exchange, Dynamics, SQL Server and Active Directory, and works closely with leading vendors, including Oracle, SAP, IBM and Red Hat. Learn more about workload protection.
Reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/site-recovery-faq
Related
Currently I am hosting my online application on an Azure VM. This is a pretty standard Umbraco website with around 300 visitors per day, nothing special here.
Details of Azure VM:
- Basic A3
- 4 cores
- 7 GB Memory
In the current situation MsSQL is installed on the VM itself and this is working fine, but I am not a great expert in maintenance. A solution I found is migrating the SQL database to SQL Azure.
Looking at my current website I decided to do this and I migrated the database to SQL Azure:
- S3 Standard
- 100 DTU
- 250GB
After the migration I switched the connection string with the connection string that was provided in the Azure portal. When I reloaded my website the loading time was suddenly three times slower.
For now I switched it back to the local SQL Database, but I am wondering if it is a normal situation that the local SQL is faster then SQL Azure in this case.
I hope someone can answer my question, please let me know if more information is required to answer my question.
Best regards, Martijn
EDIT
The issue is resolved! I found out that the SQL Azure Server that I created was located in a different region then the Azure VM. After I created a new SQL Azure server in the same region the performance issues where fixed.
Good to hear your perf issues are fixed. In general, comparing the performance of a local database versus a PaaS database is not always an apples-to-apples comparison for a number of reasons:
Azure SQL Database is a highly available service (99.99%) that requires synchronous commits to a secondary database. A local database typically is not configured for high availability.
Azure SQL Database provides automatic backup. Depending on your setup, a local database might may or may not be configured for backup.
The affect of network latency on a local database does not exist
The memory and CPU between of a S3 Azure SQL Database and a A3 VM are likely not the same
Our new system handle HIPPA data and has security equirements.
Azure handles secure connections, but we're looking at TDE as well.
One of our consultants said that TDE is possible by creating a virtual server in Azure and loading SQL Server 2012 Enterprise edition directly on to the server. This would be outside of the Azure provisioning. Would this work?
I know that a recent release that's currently in preview that would accomodate TDE. Does any one know were I can get the preview version?
Thank you for your help
From your description, I'm assuming you're referring to running SQL Server in an Azure VM. If that's correct, TDE has nothing to do with Azure provisioning.
You can pick any of the SQL Server VM templates available that supports TDE. After Azure completes provision of the VM, you can login to your SQL Server and enable TDE. You can certainly still upload your own VM image but unless you have some corporate standards, pre-installed software, etc... a regular provision is probably the easiest and fastest.
Hi I'm playing around with HDInsight. I'm putting log files into Azure storage and then using Hive external tables to map onto them. I believe Microsoft recommend Azure storage to HDFS so you can delete and recreate the clusters without losing data. What is the scalability vs HDFS. My understanding of HDFS is that it is spread over multiple nodes to allow parallel processesing how does this compare to Azure storage.
On HDInsight, HDFS storage is based on disks that run in the physical hosts of the VMs (PaaS VMs called worker roles in Windows Azure).
Windows Azure storage has its own scalability mechanisms. The scalability targets are documented here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dn249410.aspx
To give you an idea, Windows Azure storage is where an OS disk lives for Windows Azure IaaS VMs.
In our organization we are using Hyper-V VMs. We are using Progress Database and apps in the workstations.
For us to migrate into the Microsoft Azure cloud, do we have to migrate our existing Progress database to SQL and rewrite our apps ?
No. You haven't given us much detail about your applications or architecture, but if I make the assumption that you are using the embedded database product by Progress software, then I see no reason that can't run on an Azure VM.
I am using Azure VM role. I created a separate VHD (uploaded to page blob) for storing SQL data files (to overcome data persistence issue with VM role). The SharePoint 2010 has been configured on VM. I want to run 2 instances of Azure VM, where I am faining as mounting the data VHD in write mode on 2 instances is not possible. Can anyone help me out in this?
To add to what Joannes said:
A Cloud Drive may be mounted by exactly one writer, but you can make any number of read-only snapshots. This won't help with a scale-out scenario that you're describing, but I just wanted to clarify.
SharePoint 2010 is not a supported configuration in a VM Role currently. There's licensing, compatibility with SQL Azure to consider, scale-out, and potentially other issues. Same goes with installing SQL Server in a VM Role.
Support issues aside, you could look into Azure Connect as a way to reach an on-premise SQL Server instance. This alleviates your need to store SQL Server data files in a Cloud Drive. This will have bandwidth-related performance and cost implications, but it's certainly an option.
CloudDrive is not intended for scaling out. In other words, a blob can be mounted by no more than 1 VM at the same time. This limitation is very unlikely to be lifted in the future, as a single blob is note intended to support scalable writes.