Skip to main content

#MyAzureLabs: DRaaS using Azure: Test your DR strategy

This is Part 2 of my blog post on DRaaS using Azure. You can view first part of the blog here

In first part, we discussed how to protect your on-prem physical servers using Azure Site Recovery services. Having a DR strategy and enabling protection is not always enough. You should ensure that your DR strategy will work as expected when a disaster strikes. In case of usual DR solutions, it is not always possible to test the DR strategy without downtimes. However, Azure Site Recovery provides you with an option to test your DR strategy and keep it well oiled and battle ready!! Test failover to the rescue..  Lets see how we can do a test failover of on-prem physical services to Azure.

Select the vault where your replicated data resides. Select the settings, and choose the replicated items.



Select the option "Test failover"



Select the settings of the test failover. The failover direction will be automatically selected, ie from on-prem to Azure. You can select the recovery point and the virtual network. Recovery point can be the latest point in time, latest processed point in time, latest application consistent point in time or even a custom restore point. The virtual network should not be same as what you will be using in your production, ie the one that you specified in the target configuration while enabling the replication



Click ok and the test failover will begin!!

Now, if you go and check the job status you can see a number of things happening. The test failover will create a test environment, spin up your VM and at one point wait for your input to complete testing



The VM created by the test failover will be listed in the portal now. You will have to do some additional configurations though to connect to the VM and test your applications

- Go to the settings of the VM, select the NIC card and associate a public address to it
- Now associate a NSG to the NIC card and create the rules that you require, for eg: RDP access, access to a web site that you might be running in the VM etc

After that the connect button of the VM will be enabled and you can connect to it and test your applications.

All done now and if you are happy with the DR test, you can clear the failover environment with a single click. Go back to the test failover job, click on  "complete failover" . You will have to provide a reason, and then click ok.



That's and the test environment will be magically cleaned up by ASR !! Now that is a very easy and clean way of testing your DR strategy without disturbing any of your existing environments..
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Windows server 2012: where is my start button??

If you have been using Windows Server OS for a while, the one thing that will strike you most when you login to a Windows server 2012 is that there is no start button!!.. What??..How am I going to manage it?? Microsoft feels that you really dont need a start button, since you can do almost everything from your server  manager or even remotely from your desktop. After all the initial configurations are done, you could also do away with the GUI and go back to server core option.(In server 2012, there is an option to add and remove GUI). So does that mean, you need to learn to live without a start button. Actually no, the start button is very much there .Lets start looking for it. Option 1: There is "charms" bar on the side of your deskop, where you will find a "start" option. You can use the "Windows +C" shortcut to pop out the charms bar Option 2: There is a hidden "start area"in  the bottom left corner of your desktop
3 comments
Read more

Install nested KVM in VMware ESXi 5.1

In this blog, I will explain the steps required to run a nested KVM hypervisor on  Vmware ESXi. The installation of KVM is done on Ubuntu 13.10(64 bit). Note: It is assumed that you have already installed your Ubuntu 13.10 VM in ESXi, and hence we will not look into the Ubuntu installation part. 1) Upgrade VM Hardware version to 9. In my ESXi server, the default VM hardware version was 8. So I had to shutdown my VM and upgrade the Hardware version to 9 to get the KVM hypervisor working. You can right click the VM and select the Upgrade hardware option to do this. 2)In the ESXi host In /etc/vmware edit the 'config' file and add the following setting vhv.enable = "TRUE" 3)Edit the VM settings and go to VM settings > Options  > CPU/MMU Virtualization . Select the Intel EPT option 4) Go to Options->CPUID mask> Advanced-> Level 1, add the following CPU mask level ECX  ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- --H- ---- 5) Open the vmx
5 comments
Read more

Virtual fibre channel in Hyper V

Virtual fibre channel option in Hyper V allows the connection to pass through from physical  fibre channel HBA to virtual fibre channel HBA, and still have the flexibilities like live migration. Pre-requisites: VM should be running Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 Supported physical HBA with N_Port Virtualization(NPIV) enabled in the HBA. This can be enabled using any management utility provided by the SAN manufacturer. If you need to enable live migration, each host should be having two physical HBAs and each HBA should have two World Wide Names(WWN). WWN is used to established connectivity to FC storage.When you perform migration, the second node can use the second WWN to connect to the storage and then the first node can release its connection. Thereby the storage connectivity is maintained during live migration Configuring virtual fibre channel is a two step process Step 1: Create a Virtual SAN in the Hyper-V host First you need to click on Virtual
2 comments
Read more