Preview of Azure Site Recovery in the new Azure Portal

Finally the Azure Site Recovery service can be reached from the new Azure Portal and the ARM way of doing things! It has been possible to use ASR with PowerShell and the new ARM way for some months but only for a subset of the site recovery services (VMM/Hyper-V).

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Not a day to soon! I have a customer that we have engaged in the CSP program and as that is based on the new, the old ASR was not possible to use with that subscription and use another subscription just for ASR sucks..

As you can see on the following screendump I go into the “Getting Started” to select scenario and then follow the guide to complete and in the case with physical and VMware I need to install a process/configuration server on-premise.

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Once installed on a Windows 2012 R2 server I connect it to the ASR with the registration file,

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One thing to think about using this service is that the process server will if you do not go in and configure the bandwidth settings eat all available internet capacity as my customer so nicely explained…

Configure this to something that works for both you and the company, and with the enhanced ASR where you do not need additional servers in Azure you find this setting in the backup properties.

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It is quite easy to start and protecting your workloads and remember that the first 30 days are free 🙂

 

Azure Automation and Using Hybrid workers runbook on vSphere

During the day I have been digging into the Microsoft Operations Management Suite which is a collection of cloud services that you can get for a quite reasonable price.

The different services included is Log Analytics, Security, Automation, Availability.

I have registered my on premise Windows Servers in the log analyzer and started uploading logs getting a nice overview with several out of the box solutions that will give you a heads up on areas in your environment that needs attention…

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So how about the automation? I have already been using the automaton for different services within Azure but in this case I wanted to see how I could utilize the Hybrid worker and the VMware environment residing there.

With the release of VMware PowerCLI 6 some of the stack are remade as PowerShell Modules.

So if I configure a hybrid worker on premise with the PowerCLI installed I can then utilize that in a runbook that as an example takes an input variable VMName and restarts the VM (in this case I do it without being nice and asking for a shutdown but just pulling the plug)

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And here is the runbook:

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And here I start the runbook with the variable,

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And as you can see in the vSphere Client my VM winrecover restarts

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This can of course be made a bit more complex and also as you can see in the Azure automation view, scheduled. So if you have something that needs to be automated at 11 PM every night within your VMware vSphere environment it can be done by Azure Automation and Hybrid workers..