Category: Azure

How Do I Connect Disks To Import Data/Backups To Azure?

How do you connect your disks if USB is out of the question? I recently had some experience on a customer site and learned a few things.

The first thing to note is that you always use a naked 3.5” SATA II/III disk, and never a NAS or USB disk.

You use a disk dock/duplicator. You connect this device to the machine running the import drive prep tool, and then you plug the SATA disk(s) into the dock. Microsoft lists (under “Hard Disk Drives”) 4 supported models from 3 vendors:

  • Anker 68UPSATAA-02BU
  • Anker 68UPSHHDS-BU
  • Startech SATADOCK22UE
  • Sharkoon QuickPort XT HC

The Anker and Startech models (these precise models) are:

  • Old USB 2.0 devices
  • Not distributed outside of the USA

I got my Startech SATADOCK22UE via Ebay from the USA, which cost around $100 after purchase, shipping, and import duties. The USB 3.0 Sharkoon appears to be available outside the USA via the likes of Amazon. I wouldn’t describe it as widely distributed, but it might be the best of the 4 options.

My advice: don’t take chances and get 1 of the above. I worked with a customer that bought a newer USB 3.0 European Startech dock model and the Azure drive prep tool refused to work with it:

[Error] Command failed with exception: AzImportDll.AzImportException: Could not read serial number or signature for the drive. This is a critical error an the command cannot run. This may be due to certain USB adapter or disk drivers that are not fully compatible with the operating system.

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This was despite the fact that Device Manager has no issues with the disk which we were able to initialize and format. So keep it predictable, and make the effort to get one of the supported disk docks.

New Features in Azure – 29 April 2016

Microsoft sent out an announcement about feature changes/additions in Azure last night. Some news there that was much quicker than I expected …

Azure Container Service Generally Available

Azure Container Service helps customers manage container-based applications in production, at scale. Azure Container Service is fully integrated with the Azure portal, Azure Resource Manager, and our compute, storage, and networking resources. This supports Docker images, using familiar tools and either open-source DCOS or Docker Swarm as the underlying orchestration technology. The only cost for Azure Container Service is what you pay to use the underlying resources.

New Azure Storage Cool Tier Generally Available

Azure storage was cheap already, but it just got cheaper. Now we have a lower tier for blob storage, that can be used for services like backup, disaster recovery, or data archival. As a result, the storage pricing page has been updated to reflect the new options. Here is the pricing for block blobs (backup) in North Europe:

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LRS, what we typically see being used for on-prem backup, costs (in North Europe):

  • €0.0084 or $0.01 per GB in cool storage
  • €0.0202 or $0.024 per GB in hot storage

Seriously, that is cheap. Microsoft has detailed the transaction pricing too (this really only affects huge deployments):

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As you can infer from the above, cool storage really is for infrequently accessed data. Hot storage is where frequently accessed data should reside.

The SLA on cold storage is lower – at 99% which is still pretty damned good, especially for the price. You can bump that up with the RA-GRS redundancy option, where Microsoft provides a higher read SLA of  99.9% for the Cool access tier.

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Note that I don’t yet see a way to use cool storage with Azure Backup, in either the old or the new portals. But a number of 3rd party backup tools can use it. Note that you have to create a new storage account type called BlobStorage in ARM to gain access to hot/cold, and you can convert from cold to hot, and vice versa (the above transaction costs will be charged for conversions starting on June 1st).

Azure Site Recovery Portal General Availability

The DR solution, ASR, now has support in the new Azure Portal. This adds support for ARM (CSP). Improvements include:

  • Azure Resource Manager support for all scenarios
  • First-class support for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) subscriptions
  • Streamlined Getting Started experience for all Site Recovery scenarios
  • New Policy construct for flexible association and management
  • Functionality of Backup and Azure Site Recovery in a single vault construct

Enhanced VMware to Azure:

  • New Exclude Disk functionality when replicating VMware VMs to Azure
  • Support for Premium Storage for high-churn workloads

I still don’t see ASR as being ready in ARM. Yes, I can replicate and failover VMs, but I see Azure AD and RemoteApp as essential pieces to the solution. What good are machines in the cloud if I cannot access them? Yes, I can use point-site VPN (don’t assume you’ll have site-site VPN option from your alternative office, e.g. a hotel meeting room) and the “fun” that will cause, but how will my legacy applications perform … after I’ve spent hours installing them on new laptops I just bought? Unfortunately, Service Manager (Azure V1) continues to be my recommendation for DR solutions in Azure, and the rumblings tell me that it’ll stay that way for another 6 or so months 🙁 It’s a pity because the new ASR UI is pretty nice.

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How To Force Azure Replication To Stop From Orphaned Hyper-V VM

There is a scenario when you are using Azure Site Recovery and a VM somehow becomes orphanened, no longer controlled by ASR, but you cannot remove replication from the VM on the host. I had that situation this morning with a WS2012 R2 Hyper-V VM (no VMM present).

The situation leaves you in a position where you cannot disable replication on the VM using either the UI or PowerShell, because the host continues to believe that replication is managed by Azure, even if you remove the provider (agent) from the host or remove the host from ASR. In PowerShell, you get the error:

Operation not allowed because the virtual machine ‘<name>’ is replicating to a provider other than Hyper-V”

Failed ASR Removal

Microsoft has guidance on how to clear this problem up for Hyper-V to Azure and VMM to Azure replication, which I found by accident after a difficult 30 minutes! The key for me to the solution was to run a small 4 line script that removes replication using WMI, found under the heading “Clean up protection settings manually (between Hyper-V sites and Azure)”. I copied that script into ISE (running with elevated admin rights) and replication was disabled for the VM.

My Early Experience With Azure Backup Server

In this post I want to share with you my early experience with using Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS) in production. I rolled it out a few weeks ago, and it’s been backing up our new Hyper-V cluster for 8 days. Lots of people are curious, so I figured I’d share information about the quality of the experience, and the amount of storage that is being used in the Azure backup vault.

What is Azure Backup Server?

Microsoft released the free (did I say free?) Microsoft Azure Backup Server last year to zero acclaim. The reason why is for another day, but the real story here is that MABS is:

 

  • The latest version of DPM that does not require any licensing to be purchased.
  • With the only differences being that it doesn’t do tape drives and it requires an Azure backup vault.
  • It is designed for disk-disk-cloud backup.
  • It supports Hyper-V, servers and PCs, SQL Server, SharePoint, and Exchange.
  • It is free – no; you don’t have to give yellow-box-backup vendors from the 1990s any more money for their software that was always out of date, or those blue-box companies where the job engine rarely worked once you left the building.

The key here is disk-disk-cloud. You install MABS on an on-premises machine instead of the usual server backup product. It can be a VM or a physical machine, running Windows Server (Ideally WS2012 or later to get the bandwidth management stuff).

MABS uses agents to backup your workloads to the MABS server. The backup data is kept for a short time (5 days by default) locally on disk. That disk that is used for backup must be 1.5 x the size of the data being protected … don’t be scared because RAID5 SATA or Storage Spaces parity is cheap. The disk system must appear in Disk Management on the MABS machine.

As I said, backup data is kept for a short while locally on premises. The protection policy is configured to forward data to Azure for long-term protection. By default it’ll keep 180 daily backups, a bunch of weeklies and monthlies, and 10 yearly backups – that’s all easily customized.

All management (right now) is done on the MABS server. So you do have centralized management and reporting, and you can configure an SMTP server for email alerts.

And did I mention that MABS is free? All you’re paying for here is for Azure Backup:

Please note that you do not need to buy OMS or System Center to use Azure Backup (in any of it’s forms), as some wing of Microsoft marketing is trying to incorrectly state.

The Installation

Microsoft has documented the entire setup of MABS. It’s not in depth, but it’s enough to get going. The setup is easy:

  • Create a backup vault in Azure
  • Download the backup vault credentials
  • Download MABS
  • Install MABS and supply the backup vault credentials

The setup is super easy. It’s easy to configure the local backup storage and re-configure the Azure connection. And agents are easy to deploy. There’s not much more that I can say to be honest.

Create your protection groups:

  • What you want to backup
  • When you want recovery points created
  • How long to keep stuff on-premises
  • What to send to Azure
  • How long to keep stuff in Azure
  • How to do that first backup to Azure (network or disk/courier)

My Experience

Other than one silly human error on my part on day 1, the setup of the machine was error-free. At work, we currently have 8 VMs on the new Hyper-V cluster (including 2 DCs) – more will be added.

All 8 VMs are backed up to the local disk. We create recovery points at 13:00 and 18:30, and retain 7 days of local backup. This means that I can quickly restore a lost VM across the LAN from either 13:00 or 18:30 over a span of 7 days.

The protection group forwards backup of 6 of the VMs to Azure – I excluded the DCs because we have 2 DCs running permanently in Azure via a site-site VPN (for Azure AD Connect and for future DR rollout plans).

Other than that day 1 error, everything has been easy – there’s that word again. Admittedly, we have way more bandwidth than most SMEs because we’re in the same general area as the Azure North Europe region, SunGard, and the new Google data centre.

Disk Utilization

The 8 VMs that are being protected by MABS are made up of 839 GB of VHDX files. We have 7 days of short term (local disk) retention and we’ve had 8 days of protection. Our MABS server is using 1,492.42 GB of storage. Yes, that is more than 1.5x but that is because we modified the default short-term retention policy (from 5 to 7 days) and we are creating 2 recovery points per day instead of the default of 1.

We use long-term retention (Azure backup vault) for 6 of those VMs. Those VMs are made up of 716.5 GB of VHDX files. Our Azure backup vault (GRS) currently is sitting at 344.81 GB after 8 days of retention. It’s growing at around 8 GB per day. I estimate that we’ll have 521 GB of used storage in Azure after 30 days.

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How Much Is This Costing?

I can push the sales & marketing line by saying MABS is free (I did say this already?). But obviously I’m doing disk-disk-cloud backup and there’s a cost to the cloud element.

I’ve averaged out the instance sizes and here are the instance charges per month:

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GRS Block Block costs $0.048 per GB per month for the first terabyte. We will have an estimate 521 GB at the end of the month so that will cost us (worst case, because you’re billed on a daily basis and we only have 344 GB today) $25.

So this month, our backup software , which includes both traditional disk-disk on-premises backup and online backup for long-term retention, will cost us $25 + $60, for a relatively small $85.

The math is easy, just like setting up and using MABS.

What About Other Backup Products?

There are some awesome backup solutions out there – I am talking about born-in-virtualization products … and not the ones designed for tape backup 20 years ago that some of you buy because that’s what you’ve always bought. Some of the great products even advertise on this site 🙂 They have their own approaches and unique selling points, which I have to applaud, and I encourage you to give their sites a visit and test their free trials. So you have choices – and that is a very good thing.

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Azure in CSP

If you work for a Microsoft partner then there’s a good chance that you’ve heard of CSP. This is a new method for reselling subscription services such as Office 365, CRM Online, EMS, and Azure (and more) instead of direct billing (by Microsoft) or Open (resold) licensing agreements. The benefit of CSP is that:

  • A partner can resell Microsoft services, therefore making a margin, and ideally wrap it up in deployment/management services.
  • The customer gets the post-usage monthly invoice that they expect from the cloud instead of pre-paying for services for a year (Office 365 in Open) or pre-buying credits (Azure in Open).

My employers (MicroWarehouse Ltd in Ireland) are a Type 2 CSP reseller, meaning that we distribute CSP to “breadth” partners that do not have a CSP agreement. They, in turn, add a margin and sell CSP services to their customers. We’re fully on-board with this service, selling services like Office 365 and EMS.

But, I am not recommending that Azure is sold by our customers (resellers) via CSP. Why?

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

Most folks still haven’t heard of or understand what ARM is. ARM is a new way for you/Azure to deploy resources in Microsoft’s cloud, and is sometimes referred to as Azure v2. Before now, we use Service Management, which is also referred to as Classic or Azure v1. The two are quite different. For example:

  • Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery (2 of the most popular features with our customers) are fully available in Service Management but only available via PowerShell in ARM.
  • Other features like RemoteApp won’t be in ARM until the Summer (allegedly – I say “allegedly” because some features were meant to be in ARM now, but are not).
  • The designs of VMs are very different – resource providers are used, and the networking is very different. Endpoints are replaced by a PowerShell-only load balancer that is quite complex.

PowerShell fundamentalists and radicals will scream that techies should have enough there now, but the training I have run recently affirms my view on PowerShell. I love using PowerShell, but few outside of the conference-going community (a small percentage) have the first clue, and probably never will. The GUI is required still to make the product sell.

CSP and ARM

So here’s the gotcha. For some reason, Microsoft decided that customers who get a subscription in CSP will only be able to use ARM. Meanwhile, customers that have direct/trial, EA or Open subscriptions can deploy in either ARM or Service Management.

So, if your business currently or possibly will be using IaaS components, then I’m advising that you do not acquire Azure via CSP. If you’re in the SME world (less than 250 users) then stick with Azure in Open. If you’re over 250 users then go EA. And partners – avoid direct billing and trials (only convert into direct billing) because there’s nothing in it for you. You can start/continue to resell other online services via CSP, but Azure is just not ready yet, and we can blame some mysterious decision making by Microsoft for that. Hopefully we’ll get feature parity between Service Management and ARM soon, and then I’ll chance my recommendation about Azure in CSP.

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Azure Stack Preview Is Public

Microsoft has launched the public preview of Azure Stack, something that has been in TAP for several months now. You can find the download on MSDN right now.

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This is the first time that you can run services in Azure, a hosting partner, or on premises … with the same consistent experience. ARM (Azure Resource Manager) is at the heart of that consistency. On prem, you get Azure Stack (without requiring System Center) which integrates into resource providers for storage networking, etc in WS2016. Hyper-V, storage accounts, and the network fabric (Network Controller) are all in WS2016.

I’ve been told by folks in the TAP that MAS is gooood, and much easier to deploy than Windows Azure Pack (WAPack).

I doubt I’ll ever see MAS on any of my customers’ sites, but this is still a big day. And it puts Microsoft in a unique position ahead of VMware (the failed vCloud Air), Amazon and Google (public cloud only).

What Courier Can You Use For Azure Drive Import?

Azure offers a service where you can do out-of-band data transfers to/from Azure by sending physical disks via courier. Sounds great – right? Except….

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OK, I have had some pretty awful experiences with FedEx – including receiving parcels from Microsoft, funnily enough – but I can get over that.

Let’s go over to FedEx and see how much it will cost me to send a parcel of disks from my office to the nearby Azure North region, here in Ireland.

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Hmm, so I cannot send data from a location in Ireland, where Azure is officially sold by Microsoft, to Azure Europe North, which is located “somewhere” in Ireland (use Google and it won’t take you long to find what I am not allowed to share).

So I reached out to @AzureSupport on Twitter. They came back with a response.

Courier to ship disks to Azure

So you don’t need to use FedEx to ship to Microsoft, but you need an account with FedEx to get your disk(s) back.

The Genuine Need for Disaster Recovery In Ireland/EU

How many times have you watched or read the news, saw some story about an earthquake, hurricane, typhoon, or some other disaster and think “that will never happen here”? Stop kidding yourself; disasters can happen almost everywhere.

I’ve always considered Ireland to be relatively safe. We don’t have (anything you’d notice) earthquakes, typhoons, or tornadoes; our cattle and sheep don’t need flying licenses. Our weather is dominated by the gulf stream, keep Ireland temperate. It doesn’t get hot here (we are quite northerly) and our winters consist of cloud, rain, and normally about half a day of snow. We get the tail end of some of those hurricanes that hit the east coast US, but there’s not much left by the time they reach us – some trees get knocked over, some tiles knocked on our roofs, but it’s not too bad. Even when we look at our neighbours in England, we see how their more extreme climate causes them disasters that we don’t get. Natural disasters just don’t happen here. Or do they?

The last month or so has revealed that to be a lie. Ireland has been battered by 6 storms in the past month. The latest, Storm Frank, was preceded with warnings that the country was saturated. That means that the ground has absorbed all of the water that it can; any further rainfall will not be absorbed, and it will pool, flow, and flood.

This morning, I woke to these scenes:

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Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford [Image source: Paddy Banville]

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Graignamanagh, Co. Kilkenny [Image source: Graignamanagh G.A.A]

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Middleton, Co. Cork [Image source: Fiona Donnelly]

Frank isn’t finished. It’s still blowing outside my office and more rain is sure to fall. There are stories of communities being evacuated to hotels, and the above photos are just the easy ones for the media to access.

This isn’t just a case of cows trapped in fields, stick a sandbag on it and you’re sorted, or somewhere far away. This is local. And Ireland is a relatively safe place – we’re not Oklahoma, a place that some deity has decided should be subject to cat 5 tornadoes every time you’re not looking. Dorothy, the point is, that disasters happen everywhere, including in the EU where we think it safe.

Let’s bring this back to business. Businesses have been put out of action by these floods. Odds are any computers or servers were either on the ground floor or in the basement. Those machines are dead. That means those businesses are dead. They might be lucky enough to have tapes (let’s leave that for another time) stored offsite but how reliable are they and will bare-metal restore work, or will it take forever? How much money will those businesses lose, or more critically, will those businesses survive loss of customers?

This is exactly why these businesses need a disaster recovery (DR) solution. There are several reasons why they don’t have one now:

  • Fires and other unnatural disasters happen everywhere
  • They couldn’t afford one
  • The business owners didn’t think there was a need for one
  • Some resellers didn’t think there was demand for one so they never brought it up with their customers

The need is there, as we can clearly see above. And thanks to Microsoft Azure, DR has never been so affordable. FYI, it comes in at a price that is a small fraction of the cost of solutions from the likes of Irish companies such as KeepITSafe – I’ve done the competitive pricing – and it opens that customer up to more technical opportunities with hybrid cloud solutions.

Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Services (ASR) is a disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) or cloud DR site offering from Microsoft. The beauty of it is that it’s there for everyone from the small business to the large enterprise. It works with Hyper-V, vSphere or physical machines, and it works with Windows or Linux as long as the OS is supported by Azure (W2008 R2 or later on the Windows side).

Note: There is a cost overhead for vSphere or physical machines to allow for on-premises conversion and forward and in-cloud management and storage, so you need a certain scale to absorb that cost. This is why I describe ASR as being perfect for SMEs with Hyper-V and mid-large companies with Hyper-V, vSphere or physical machines.

If I had ASR in place, and I has a business on the quayside in Cork, near the Slaney in Enniscorthy, or anywhere else where the rivers were close to bursting the banks then I would perform a planned failover, requiring about 2 minutes of my time to started a pre-engineered and tested one-click failover. My machines would shut down in the desired order, flush the last bit of replication to Azure, and start up the VMs in the desired order in Azure, and my machines and data would be safe. I can failback to new equipment or stay in Azure if the disaster wipes out my servers. And if that disaster doesn’t happen, I can easily failback to new equipment, or choose to stay in Azure and not worry about local floods again.

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How Much Does X In Azure Cost?

If you want to make me angry/ridicule you, this is the question to ask me.

Let me ask you a question. How much does it cost to buy a car?

Well, sir/mam, that depends. Would you like this fine classic?

Or would you like something more mobile but on the basic end?

How about something with a bit more oomph?

What sort of features would you like added?

Or would you like to go all out?

The answer to “how much is a car?” is anywhere between $0 and (last recorded at auction) $52,000,000.

So, when there are so many variations in Azure VMs, storage types, ways to connect to Azure, options for backing up, enabling DR, etc, how do you expect to price up an cloud solution with a question like “how much is a VM in the cloud?”.

Azure is a technical sale.

Azure is a technical sale.

Azure is a technical sale.

Azure is a technical sale.

Azure is a TECHNICAL sale.

Let me repeat that one more time …

Azure is a TECHNICAL sale.

No design = no pricing. Simples.

In a technical pre-sale, then you’ll do something called a “design”. This “design” allows you to do something called “specification”. In the “design” you figure out which bits you need. The “specification” allows you figure out the sizes of those bits. Strangely enough, there is this thing called “Google” that allows you to search for available specs and pricing, such as:

  • Azure sizes VM
  • Azure pricing VM
  • Azure pricing storage
  • Azure pricing gateway
  • Azure pricing data transfer
  • Azure pricing backup
  • AZURE PRICING site recovery
  • AZURE PRICING RemoteApp

I really doubt that I have some unique intellect that has identified a search pattern that no one else can find. But some days … I do wonder.

If you are a potential Azure customer, I have two tips for working with consultants/sales people:

  • Technical requirement: NO ONE can price Azure without a technical engagement. As an end customer, I never took a meeting without a technical pre-sales person present. No techie there in reception, then I didn’t come down. Was I being a d*ck? Yeah, but I made it clear how I bought.
  • Give them a test: Ask the consulting company to price up a solution … in front of you .. right there … with no notice. Informed questions that look to fix down a design/spec are indicators of knowledge. Signs of panic, procrastination. non-vibrating phones being answered … they’re bad signs.

For you consulting companies, the advice is simple. Cop on and skill up. Take advantage of every opportunity, and there are lots with many of them free, that there is to skill up: “we’re too busy” is bull$h1t. Classic sales people do have a role: sell the concepts to the managers. After that, you need to bring in the techs and design/spec up a solution. Failing to do so, will get you nowhere, other than looking like an idiot trying to build castles on sand.

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Understanding & Pricing Azure Virtual Machine Backup

In this article I want to explain how you can backup Azure virtual machines using Azure Backup. I’ll also describe how to price up this solution.

Backing up VMs

Believe it or not, up until a few weeks ago, there was no supported way to backup production virtual machines in Azure. That meant you had no way to protect data/services that were running in Azure. There were work-arounds, some that were unsupported and some that were ineffective (both solution and cost-wise). Azure Backup for IaaS VMs was launched in preview, and even if it was slow, it worked (I relied on it once to restore the VM that hosts this site).

The service is pretty simple:

  1. You create a backup vault in the same region as the virtual machines you want to protect.
  2. Set the storage vault to be LRS or GRS. Note that Azure Backup uses the Block Blob service in storage accounts.
  3. Create a backup policy (there is a default one there already)
  4. Discover VMs in the region
  5. Register VMs and associate them with the backup policy

Like with on-premises Azure Backup, you can retain up to 366 recovery points, and using an algorithm, retain X dailies, weeklies, monthlies and yearly backups up to 99 years. A policy will backup a VM to a selected storage account once per day.

This solution creates consistent backups of your VMs, supporting Linux and Windows, without interrupting their execution:

  • Application consistency if VSS is available: Windows, if VSS is functioning.
  • File system consistency: Linux, and Windows if VSS is not functioning.

The speed of the backup is approximately:

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The above should give you an indication of how long a backup will take.

Pricing

There are two charges, a front-end charge and a back-end charge. Here is the North Europe pricing of the front-end charge in Euros:

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The front-end charge is based on the total disk size of the VM. If a VM has a 127 GB C:, a 40 GB D: and a 100 GB E: then there are 267 GB. If we look at the above table we find that this VM falls into the 50-500 GB rate, so the privilege of backing up this VM will cost me €8.44 per month. If I deployed and backed up 10 of these VMs then the price would be €84.33 per month.

Backup will consume storage. There’s three aspects to this, and quite honestly, it’s hard to price:

  • Initial backup: The files of the VM are compressed and stored in the backup vault.
  • Incremental backup: Each subsequent backup will retain differences.
  • Retention: How long will you keep data? This impacts pricing.

Your storage costs are based on:

  • How much spaces is consumed in the storage account.
  • Whether you use LRS or GRS.

Example

If have 5 VMs in North Europe, each with 127 GB C:, 70 GB D:, and 200 GB E:. I  want to protect these VMs using Azure Backup, and I need to ensure that my backup has facility fault tolerance.

Let’s start with that last bit, the storage. Facility fault tolerance drives me to GRS. Each VM has 397 GB. There are 5 VMs so I will require at most €1985 for the initial backup. Let’s assume that I’ll require 5 TB including retention. If I search for storage pricing, and look up Block Blob GRS, I’ll see that I’ll pay:

  • €0.0405 per GB per month for 1 TB = 1024 * €0.0405 = €41.48
  • €0.0399 per GB per month for the next 49 TB = 4096 * €0.0399 = €163.44

For a total of €204.92 for 5 TB of geo-redundant backup storage.

The VMs are between 50-500 GB each, so they fall into the €8.433 per protected instance bracket. That means the front-end cost will be €8.433 * 5 = €42.17.

So my total cost, per month, to backup these VMs is estimated to be €42.17 + €204.92 = €247.09.