In this demonstration,
we're going to do a very light touch introduction to MABS, the
Microsoft Azure Backup Server. You saw at the end of the previous
demo that if you're configuring your Recovery Services vault to
back up off‑cloud workloads,
particularly Microsoft ones, that's the exam alert here if you're
asked about backing up on‑premises Exchange,
SQL Server, SharePoint, and particularly bare metal recovery. The MABS,
or Microsoft Azure Backup Server, is a free download.
It takes a while to install.
You'll definitely want to pay close attention to the docs and follow it along.
I have installed it, I should say,
on a Windows Server 2019 machine. You do have to have SQL Server, so
got SQL Server 2017 installed on this machine.
And once you've got the Azure Backup Server loaded up, it's a question
of mastering the learning curve of the interface,
which isn't particularly user‑friendly, in my humble opinion. Let me just give
you the high‑level view of what you've got going on here.
So if we go down under Management,
you are going to need to register the Azure Backup Server with the RS vault.
And again,
you do that using the vault credentials that we talked about before, you see.
So we go to Register. Are you using a proxy?
No.
Where is your vault credential? So, onboarding MABS into the Recovery
Services vault is actually the easiest part. More to the point, you need
to configure disk storage, local storage because the idea is that you can
do disk‑to‑disk to cloud backups.
So, you can keep your backups locally and have a copy go
up to the Recovery Services vault.
So I've brought in an e‑volume here to serve as my local disk
storage. And then we can enumerate our protected servers. Looks
like my agent is out of date here.
And as you can see,
the MABS interface allows you to centrally manage the agent
that you'll need to install on each machine. And you see the
text is probably pretty small,
but down below it's referencing DPM DPM administrator console. You're
going to see some of those things that may scratch your head if you don't
understand, fortunately, you do, that MABS is simply a stripped‑down
version of the licensed product, the commercial product, System Center
Data Protection Manager, or DPM.
So once you've got the back end up and running,
you'll want to go over to Protection, and you wind up
creating what are called protection groups. And I created one
protection group called SQL‑DPM‑DB,
where I've enlisted one computer, which is this one, and then
I've gone in and selected a workload to protect.
And those workloads can be very flexible, as you can see here.
I have specifically selected protection in terms of SQL Server
databases, and I'm right‑clicking a lot, and you can see a lot of
the options that show up when you do that.
If you click New, it's going to walk you through creating a new protection group.
Let me just quickly show you that. I'm going to back up servers, of
course, and then we're asked to enumerate any members here.
I've deployed to DC1 and WIN2019.
We can grab file shares.
We can grab entire volumes. If there's any workloads, like in this
case, it's a domain controller, so there's Active Directory. I'm
just going to grab my shares folder here.
What does it say? You've already enabled protection for this if
you want to protect it. I don't want System State. I just want to
grab this backup of this file share.
Now if I expand Windows Server 2019, you can see that it's a Hyper‑V
server, so we can bring up host and individual VMs.
It's a SQL Server, so we can enumerate that workload.
This is one of the nice benefits of DPM and Azure Backup Server,
as I've said before. Do you want to use short‑term protection
on disk, or do you just want to do online?
What's the name of the protection group?
I'll call it DC1‑Shares. Click Next.
What is our retention range?
Our recovery point objective? Just verifying if we have enough storage locally
to handle the backup. Are we going to go over the network?
Are we going to do it now, later, or manually? Consistency checking,
select the data source you want to protect online.
Okay.
Here's our backup interval. Here is our retention, transfer over the
network, Create Group, and then we're off and running.
So that's just a really quick and fast little explanation about how
to get off the ground with Azure Backup Server.
But ultimately,
I think you saw that the vault credential is really what unlocks
that registration between your local solution,
whether it's the individual MARS agent, or if it's using the much more robust
MABS, or Azure Backup Server solution. Ah, looks like I've got an agent
incompatibility here, and we can go through and troubleshoot that. I'm not
going to, and you don't have to sit through it. I'll call this demo done now.