Azure Backup Server. I have to warn you here that we're
going to be seeing quite a few acronyms here. I was going to
say TLAs, three‑letter acronyms,
but it's actually FLAs, four‑letter acronyms. And yes,
you do have to know this for the exam.
I'm not the kind of teacher who does filler.
So first there's the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services agent,
affectionately called the MARS agent.
Now this is simply an extension,
a free bit of software you can install on your Windows
Server systems that extends the built‑in Windows Server
backup, or wbadmin, as it's called.
This MARS agent is appropriate not for enterprises,
but for one‑off scenarios, because we're not talking about
orchestrating the backup of an entire multi‑tier workload.
We're also not talking about orchestrating the backup of dozens,
hundreds, thousands of servers.
It's not scalable.
It's a one‑off agent that simply unlocks a connection,
an authenticated connection, between individual
servers and a Recovery Services vault.
The supported workloads are files and folders,
volumes, and system state, pretty bare bones.
If you're looking for bare‑metal restore, you cannot do that with
the MARS agent and the Recovery Services vault.
If you're looking to back up an Exchange server farm on premises,
you can't do it. If you're looking to back up SQL Server clusters or more
orchestrated workloads, you're going to need, not the MARS agent,
but wait for it, the Azure Backup Server, or MABS. I kid
you not, MABS is what it's called.
MABS, or the Azure Backup Server, the M is Microsoft, is a free scaled‑down
edition of an enterprise license product Microsoft has called Microsoft System
Center Data Protection Manager, or DPM for short.
In fact, you'll find that when you're using the free Azure Backup Server,
you'll see references to DPM all over the place,
because it is, in fact, the DPM engine, but it's been significantly scaled back.
The idea is if you want full functionality, you'll need licensing for DPM.
MABS is a way to give hybrid cloud backup and integration with
Recovery Services vault to more customers.
That's the idea.
And so, therefore, there's more supported scenarios.
There's "bare metal" backup and restore,
SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and also very importantly,
backup for Hyper‑V VMs and VMware VMs. That's quite significant. Now let's do our next demo.