And the specific recovery options, or the restoration
options, are up here on the toolbar. We've got the Restore
VM path and the File Recovery path.
Let's take a look at Restore VM first.
Now hopefully it makes sense that you can't do anything unless
you've got a restore point. And I've talked about the different
consistency types that we have, and you'll notice that we've got
quite a few Crash Consistent. Now,
I'm not going to freak out about that because we know that crash
consistent is what happens if Azure Backup works when the virtual
machine is stopped and deallocated. And I happen to know that this
particular machine has been stopped and deallocated for the last
several days, the last week or more.
I'm going to grab the most recent Application Consistent snapshot, click OK. And
then here's what I was talking about in the theory part of this module, do you
want to create an entirely new virtual machine or are you going to do an
in‑place restore of just the storage. And notice also it says that if you're
going to do an alternate configuration,
you're going to have to use PowerShell or the Azure
CLI to do that restore operation.
If we're going to do a Create new, note that there's two options here as well.
We could create a new virtual machine by providing a name; Resource group;
this Virtual network would definitely be one that's different from where
web1 actually lives, you would have hopefully a dedicated DR, or disaster
recovery, virtual net to work with; Subnet; and then you specify one of
your storage accounts.
I've got twdrstorage created specifically for this reason.
Give it a name, and I could call it web1‑test just to verify that it's
going to be a test. And then we can click Restore to send that job into
the RS vault. First we can see that we're validating against the ARM
schema, and assuming all of our choices are correct and valid, that job
will be triggered. There it is.
Alright, so while that's cooking, we can do work in parallel.
Let's go back to Restore a VM, and let's again select a restore point.
I'm going to choose the most recent Application Consistent restore point,
click OK.
And again,
we'll do Create new, but then we may just want to extract the disks from that VM
and put them into a storage account. And then we could use those restored disks
to create a new VM programmatically, specifying a different configuration. Let
me click Restore to trigger that job.
So those are the two options for Create new.
The last thing we'll look at after Azure Resource Manager gives us
our control back is we'll look at the in‑place restore. Ooh,
Validation failed. Click here for more details.
Unable to initiate restore as another restore is currently in progress.
Well that is a bummer. Wouldn't we expect logically that cloud computing
supports parallel operations? Hopefully because that restore is triggered
successfully, let's try again the second restore and see if that's all
that the error was about, just making sure that the first job was at least
past the trigger state and we don't actually have to sit and wait for the
whole thing.
No, it looks like we do.
Wow, that is really disappointing.
Okay, note to self. So to finish what we were talking about,
if we go to Replace existing,
the only option here is Replace Disks. And remember, the point with
in‑place restore is that you don't want to scratch your VM
configuration and all of its dependencies.
You want to keep the shell, as it were, of the VM in place.
You're just going to swap out the OS and any data disks that are
attached. And all we need to do for this is Replace existing,
assuming that you've got your snapshot, as I said before, and
then we specify one of our storage accounts as a staging
location, and then we hit Restore.
That's all there is to it.
Good, so let's come back out of the screen and now let's take a look at
the File Recovery scenario, which is where you need to restore individual
file system artifacts from a backup snapshot.
So once again, step one is to choose the recovery point.
I'm going to choose my AppConsistent one.
And depending upon whether it's a Windows or Linux virtual machine,
you'll have either a Python or a PowerShell script.
This is a Windows machine, so I'm going to download an executable to my
local system and we'll be able to decrypt that executable and pop out
the PowerShell script that's inside of it by providing this one‑time
password that Azure is simultaneously generating for us. The script
file is ready to download, so I'll click Download to bring that down.
I will also copy the password to my clipboard. And I missed the browser
notification, so let me manually go to my Downloads directory here. Double
left‑click, I'm going to paste in that password. That decrypts the exe,
pops open an elevated PowerShell console, connects to the iSCSI client or
initiator service on the machine, and it says here to Open Explorer and
browse for files after recovery, to remove the disks and close the
connection, please click 'Unmount Disks' in the portal.
See, so now if we go to our File Explorer here,
we're going to see a new disk right here, this E drive that's labeled Windows.
This is the OS disk from that recovery snapshot.
So the idea is that I can come in here and I can restore files and folders,
and then when I'm finished I can close the connection. Pretty nice. And I
mentioned this already, but let me repeat it again.
It says here, To restore files larger than 10GB,
restore at least the disks, but maybe the entire VM to an
alternate location, and that the data transfer rate is not 10
GB/Hr, but it's up to 10 GB an hour.
So Microsoft heavily throttles the connection, so don't abuse it, okay. It's
a pretty nifty technology though, I think you'd agree.
Let's click Unmount Disks, and that will break the connection.
Now, as this says up here, the drives,
if I don't click Unmount Disks, will remain mounted on my system for 12 hours.
Now please understand, that was an over‑the‑network, over‑the‑internet
connection from my client machine into that snapshot.
It's not like I downloaded that 127GB file.
No, I didn't do that.
It's just coming over the internet via good, old iSCSI
and web services and web APIs. Alright, so how do I want to finish here?
Well,
let's go back to the vault and let's come down under Backup Jobs, and
let's take a look at, it looks like we've got a couple in process.
Here's that restore I was wondering about. Let's go to View details.
Let's see how far along it might be.
So we're recovering a VM to an alternate location.
It looks like we've got a little while here unfortunately. Remember,
this is one of the reasons why you have to have your Azure VMs in the
same region as your RS vault. And I'm not sure why I'm not farther
along than this, to be totally honest, because you know as part of
our backup policy,
we have that Instant Restore area. Now, speaking of which, we could
always come over here under Manage, Backup policies, to find your
policy and edit it just to make sure.
So our az801‑policy, let's take a look.
Yeah, so I'm maxing out the Instant Restore snapshots right here. So, anyway, you know the lay of the land. I think my work here is done.