Azure Backup Server v2, Azure Site Recovery Azure-2-Azure, Machine Groups in Service Map plus more on Episode 157 of the Need to Know podcast.
Consolidating our mobile management tools under Azure
We have consolidated our Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) suite of products under the new Azure portal, combining the Intune mobile application management tools, Azure Active Directory (AD) and Information Protection under a single console.
This offers a unified admin experience. The benefits of the integration to the Azure portal include:
- Unified console for EMS components
- The HTML-based console is built on web standards and support for most modern browsers
- For Intune, Microsoft Graph API support to automate many actions
- Azure AD groups provide compatibility across all your Azure applications
Event Hubs Capture is now Generally Available
It used to be called Azure Event Hubs Archive, now it’s called Azure Event Hubs Capture. It is a highly scalable data streaming platform and event ingestion service capable of receiving and processing millions of events per second. Event Hubs Capture makes it easy to send this data to persistent storage without using code or configuring other compute services. You can currently use it to push data directly from Event Hubs to Azure Storage as blobs.
Microsoft Azure Backup Server v2
We are excited to announce support for a whole bunch of new stuff – in the context of Azure VM DR using ASR, there’s now support for Windows Server 2016, including Storage spaces and applications such as SQL 2016, SharePoint 2016 and Exchange 2016. It means you can have multiple 1TB disks with Storage Spaces, which will now be expected to work.
- You can backup locally to disk for short term retention as well as to Azure for long term retention.
- Azure Backup Server also uses Modern Backup Storage technology (deduplication, ReFS Block Cloning, VHDX support) that helps in reducing overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
- Egress is waived, you get free restores from cloud recovery points.
- Azure Backup Server uses RCT (the native change tracking in Hyper-V), which removes the need for time-consuming consistency checks.
- Azure Backup Server’s ability to do backup and recovery of Shielded VMs securely helps in maintaining security in backups.
- Azure Backup Server comes with support for vCenter and ESXi versions 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5.
Azure Site Recovery now supports Ubuntu
Azure Site Recovery now supports disaster recovery and migration to Azure for servers running Ubuntu on Azure virtual machines or in a VMware virtualised environment.
Azure Site Recovery
We are excited to announce the public preview of Disaster Recovery (DR) for Azure VMs using Azure Site Recovery (ASR). This has been one of the most asked features. Given the increase of people hosting mission critical production workloads on Azure, a DR solution has become a key ask from multiple customers for compliance reasons. From all the customer feedback and field engagement we had in private preview, we expect this scenario to be one of the key differentiators for customers to choose Azure over other public clouds to host their production workloads.
• Offered “as-a-Service”
• Simplified experience – Enabling cross-region DR for an application is so simple that all you need to do is select the VMs you want to protect, choose a target Azure region, select replication settings and you are good to go.
• Application-aware recovery – ASR lets you stay in control at all times – you can decide when and how to orchestrate a failover.
• Non-disruptive DR tests – You can do a full DR test failover without any impact to the primary production workload or to ongoing replication.
The pricing remains same as other “to Azure” scenarios of ASR and you can take advantage of OMS licenses.
Service Map Machine Groups
With the Service Map, you can automatically discover and build a common reference map of dependencies across servers, processes, and services in real-time. It helps expedite pinpointing issues by visualising dependencies of individual servers.
To help extend these insights across multiple servers to help get a complete picture of multi-tier business service systems, we have added Machine Groups to Service Map available currently in West Europe and East US only.
With Machine Groups you can create a single map of all servers in your service to give you a holistic view of your ‘distributed applications’ from end to end across multiple tiers.
Marc Kean 