Until now, to view the backup status, you needed to open each recovery services vault and view only the status of the backup jobs of the specific recovery services job. Azure Backup Explorer allows to view the backup job status at scale, drill down to all backup items, jobs, alerts and policies and quickly troubleshoot and take actions,

How to use Azure Backup Explorer

Open any Recovery Services Vault and at the Overview screen, under the Backup , click the “Backup Explorer link.

A workbook view will open, displaying a summary of all Backup Items, Backup Jobs, Backup Alerts and Virtual Machines that are not enabled for backup. And all that info is a summary of all subscriptions and locations. You can filter the summary by subscription, vault location and vault and also you can change the time range.

The Backup Items button shows the protection state of the Virtual Machines that are backed up.

If you press the Backup Jobs button, it shows the Jobs by Status. There you can have a quick view off all backup status, like completed, completed with warnings or failed, and also the jobs by operation, like backup or restore.

Using the Backup Alerts button shows the alerts by severity and by alert type, if you have any alerts of course.

Finally the Backup not enabled button shows the Virtual Machines that are not at any backup job. You can view them by location and by resource group.

Read more at the Backup Explorer documentation

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

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Some of the major features of Azure SQL Backup for SQL Server are 15 minute RPO, one click PIT restore, long term retention, encrypted database support, auto-protect new databases, centralized management and monitor and no infrastructure deployment and management!

Learn more at the announcement page: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-backup-for-sql-server-in-azure-virtual-machines-now-generally-available/

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Backup SQL Server & AlwaysOn AG inside Azure VMs appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

Now we can restore an Azure VM directly with managed disks with a truly single-click operation.

In addition, we can restore only the unmanaged disks to a storage account and the process will create a template for us to create the VM  on a later time.

So, at the recovery services vault, select a VM to restore and you will see two main options.

Create New: to create a new Virtual Machine with managed disks or to restore the disks with the ARM Template

Replace existing: To restore the VM in-place, replacing the current VM.

At both options you will need to select a Staging storage account, in order to restore the VHD files. Those file will be auto-converted to managed disks by the process.

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post New Azure VM Restore Experience appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

Azure Backup generates alerts for all backup events, such as unsuccessful backups. A new option is to create backup alert notifications so Azure Backup will alert you firing an email when an alert is generated.

To enable the backup alert notifications, navigate to the “Backup Alerts” section of the “recovery Services vault” and click the “Configure notifications”

There switch the Email notification to On to enable the alerts. Enter one or more recipients separated with semicolon (;). Choose Per Alert or Hourly Digest. Per Alert will fire an email for every alert instantly and the Hourly Digest means that the notification agent will check for alerts every hour and will fire an email with the active alerts.

Finally choose the Severity of the alerts which you will be notified and press save.

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Azure Backup | Enable backup alert notifications appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

Azure Backup’s 1TB limitation at last is over! Now you can backup VMs with disk sizes up to 4TB(4095GB), both managed and unmanaged. Also has improvements on backup and recovery performance that you can find here.

Starting today login to the Portal, go to your Recovery Services vault and you will a notification saying “Support for >1TB disk VMs and improvements to backup and restore speed ->”

Click the notification and the “Upgrade to new VM Backup stack” will open. Here click “Upgrade” to complete the upgrade.

You can also upgrade all the Recovery Services vaults of a subscription using Azure PowerShell

1. Select the subscription:

Get-AzureRmSubscription –SubscriptionName "SubscriptionName" | Select-AzureRmSubscription

2. Register this subscription for the upgrade:

Register-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName "InstantBackupandRecovery" –ProviderNamespace Microsoft.RecoveryServices

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Get early access to large disks support of Azure Backup & more appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

A new feature is in public preview, the Azure Backup Reports. Now we can have the Azure Backup Reports at the OMS Workspace, Event Hub and Power Bi. You can use Power BI to view report dashboard, download reports and create custom reports

The configuration has two steps, one to configure the Azure Backup Reports connection with each service and the other is to get the data at each service.

First go to a Recovery Services vault and select Backup Reports. Next press the Configure button.

The Diagnostic settings blade will open. Change the Status to “On” and select the desired services to collect the Azure Backup Logs.

For the Power Bi integration we need a Storage account. So check the “Archive to storage account” option and select a storage account. The storage account must be at the same region as the Azure Backup account.

To integrate with OMS check the “Send to Log Analytics” option and select an OMS Workspace.

An other option is to stream the Azure Backup logs to event hub. To configure it check the “Stream to an event hub” and select the event hub namespace and policy name.

At the bottom part of the configuration blade select the Logs that you want to get. The retention days option is only for the Storage Account configuration.

Press save and return to the Backup reports blade. Now press the “Sign in” to connect to Power Bi to configure the Service.

At the lower left corner of the Power Bi Portal press “Get Data”

At the AppSource press the “Get” button under the Services.

Search and select the “Azure Backup”

At the connect to Azure Backup page enter the Storage Account name. This is the storage account that we selected at the Azure Backup Reports configuration.

Press next and Save. Now the Azure Backup workspace is ready. Be patient, it needs time to start reporting data.

If you go back to the Azure Portal, the Backup Reports blade has changed and it only has the option to connect to your Power Bi dashboard.

If you browse to your Power Bi dashboard, you can view the Azure Backup Reports Workspace as the below image.

For the OMS integration, you only need to go to the Log Search and query “Category=”AzureBackupReport” and you will have all the Azure Backup Report logs. Following the OMS logic you can create a custom View, you can follow this post: Azure Log Analytics

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Azure Backup Reports appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.