Azure Recovery Services Vault.
Well, of course, question number one is, what is the Recovery Services vault?
Well, it's a cloud‑hosted,
hybrid and multi‑cloud‑aware backup and replication solution.
There is a lot going on with the Recovery Services vault.
It's a really big product. It does a lot of heavy lifting.
One thing I like about it is that all the storage is managed for us,
so we could look at Recovery Services vault as a
Platform as a Service, PaaS, offering.
In other words, we don't have to worry about individual storage accounts.
All of that back‑end storage is abstracted away from us.
We have soft delete capability with a 14‑day retention.
So this means if one of your colleagues accidentally deletes
a VM backup, as long as you can get to restoring it within
that 14‑day retention window, you're good to go.
We also have Cross Region Restore.
The reason why this is important is if Microsoft were to have a failure in
your primary region where your Recovery Services vault lives,
you may have to do a restore to another region that is online.
It's nice that we've got that ability built into Recovery
Services vault, that is, zonal and regional backups.
Lastly, for compliance reasons,
you may need to demonstrate how your backup data in Azure is managed
encryption‑wise. The backup data is protected either by platform‑managed
keys, this is where Microsoft manages them,
but you can always take over that duty from Microsoft and encrypt
your data at rest in the Recovery Services vault in the Microsoft
data centers using your own customer‑managed keys that you would
store in, as I think you know, Azure Key Vault.
Now some requirements/things to think about/exam alerts with the Recovery
Services vault, chief among these tips is that your Recovery Services vault
has to be in the same region as the Azure VMs you want to back up. You
might think hold on a second. Tim. I thought that RS vaults were hybrid
cloud and multi‑cloud aware.
I thought you could do Cross Region Restore.
Well,
all of that is absolutely true, but what I'm saying is only when you're
backing up and protecting Azure VMs using the Azure Backup capability,
only in that case, to minimize latency, I think, that's why Microsoft
has this limitation, that your VMs and the Recovery Services vault have
to be in the same region.
Please remember that for your exam.
There's no problem if your Azure VMs,
the disks, are encrypted with Azure Disk Encryption, or ADE.
That's fine if you're using ADE for Windows, as well as Linux virtual machines
in Azure, native integration with Recovery Services vault.
And we also have native integration across all of Azure Resource Manager.
We can set role‑based access control, or RBAC, assignments to control
who can use the Recovery Services vault, and we can monitor our usage.
We can create alerts using the traditional ARM monitoring tools like Azure Monitor and Azure Log Analytics.