Azure Backup 02, Azure Backup MARS Agent

in this video I'm going to deploy the is your backup agent hello everyone my name is Travis and this is ciraltos in my last video on Azure backup I showed you how to set up a recovery vault and backup servers in Azure I'll add the link above this video goes over the Microsoft Azure recovery services or MARS agent also known as the azure backup agent before I begin please take a second to subscribe and click the bell icon to get notifications of new content unlike Azure servers that can use the recovery backup extension on-premises servers or servers in other cloud providers need an agent installed to backup to Azure recovery vault the MARS agent is a backup agent installed as a service on a computer the first question you may have and the one I'm trying to answer is why would you use the MARS agent there are a few reasons with the MARS agent you can backup not Azure servers so servers on-premises physical or virtual or in other cloud providers with the agent you can scope limited data for backups on Azure servers remember Azure backup extension backs up the entire server the agent can be configured on the azure server to backup a limited amount of data you get greater recovery point objectives with the MARS agent the Azure extension backs up once a day the MARS agent can run three times a day that provides a more granular RPO with the MARS agent you can backup a microsoft Azure backup server or System Center data protection management server the agent backs up the server workload to and Azure recovery vault there are some things to be aware of however the MARS agent does not support application and where backups for that you need to move to the azure backup server or System Center data protection manager solution also the MARS agent only supports a Windows OS not Linux requirements for the agent include .net 4.5 and PowerShell the MARS agent also needs access to the URLs listed on the screen the architecture looks like this the agent is installed on the server registers to the recovery services vault and backup jobs are scheduled in the agent when the backup starts the MARS agent creates a VSS snapshot this is not application where the backup is only filesystem consistent the agent creates a VHD file in the cache folder to store checksum data for the backup the checksum data is used to identify change data from the last time the backup was ran the backup data goes directly to the recovery services vault data is sent to the recovery vault compressed and encrypted to minimize and secure data transfer on a recovery the recovery point is mounted as a drive using iSCSI over a secure tunnel files from the recovery point can be accessed and copied from the mounted drive I'm gonna walk through installing the agent on a VM in my test network on-premises this will work the same way for physical servers or servers in Azure or other cloud providers if you want to follow along you will need a recovery vault setup similar to my previous video let's get started with a demo buckle up everyone it's demo time Here I am logged into a server on-premises at my home in a closet but that's not important the first thing I'm gonna do is download the agent here I'm at the portal I'm gonna go into my resource vault and as I probably mentioned before if you want to follow along you do need a recovery services vault I set that up in a previous video I'll add the link above someplace you can go back and take a look at that if you want to follow along otherwise I'm going to go into getting started back up here it's going to ask me what I want to do so what kind of workload I'm backing up and I'm gonna do on-premises and what do you want to backup now I'm gonna do files and folder and I want to do system state but let's say I wanted to add bare metal into that if I click that and prepare infrastructure it's going to direct me to download and install the Azure backup server I don't want that and the reason why I did that is because I selected bare metal bare metal isn't an option with a backup agent it's only a option with a backup server so I don't actually bare-metal what I wanted to show you is what you get will you click prepare infrastructure does it depend on the questions you answer and all I want is the backup agent and that can only backup files and folders and system state this is a two-step process the first is download the agent I'm gonna run the agent install I have two options for the installation one is the installation folder and the other is the cache location the installation folder that's pretty self-explanatory the cache location is where it's gonna hold the VHD or the actual backup data and as it states here you need at least 5% but you should have more available so if this was located on a second drive just make sure that you have enough room for that I'm gonna leave it as default and click Next I don't have any proxy configuration so I'll click Next again it does a requirements check and I have .net 4.5 installed along with PowerShell so next I'll click install now it's done I'm going to proceed to registration it will ask for vault credentials and to get that I need to come back to the portal I'm going to check the box that I've already downloaded or using the latest recovery service agent this is going to download the vault credentials that I'll use to register the agent with this recovery services vault and do note that this expires in two days I'll just save that and come back to the agent I'll click browse and that should be located in my downloads folder there it is there's all my information and I'll click Next next in the encryption settings it's going to ask me for a passphrase and I'm not going to type one in I'm just going to hit generate passphrase next it will ask me for a location to save that let's put it in documents once I have that selected I'll click finish I'll give it a couple minutes to finish okay now it's finished let's go back and look at that passphrase that I have created in documents here it is be sure to copy this information someplace safe all data that gets backed up on the server will be backed up and encrypted with that passphrase if you lose this passphrase you will not be able to get that recovery data back Microsoft doesn't have it they don't keep it this guarantees that your data is backed up and safe that nobody's going to be able to take a look at it but it also is absolutely needed to recover anything once this is done I'll click close here I am at the Microsoft Azure backup agent or MARS agent and now I'm ready to schedule some backups so I do that by clicking scheduled backup this is gonna walk me through a wizard that I can use to backup the server so I'll click Next and add items I'm going to add the system state and I don't want to add the entire C Drive I'm just going to add users you absolutely can select the C Drive and select everything to backup that's a more likely scenario in a production environment but at this point all I want is the data and users I'm going to select an exclusion setting and add an exclusion so just go down to C users I don't want to backup the downloads file so I'll click that this is going to backup everything in C users except for the data in C users administrator download and under subfolders this is important because if I wanted to backup a subfolder in downloads I could select no but I don't I want to select everything so I'll select yes and I'll click OK I'll click Next now it's going to ask me how frequently to back up the system state and I'm gonna go with daily on this and 11 p.m. is good notice you can only back up the system state once a day under retention policy I only want to keep the weekly data for four weeks and the way this is set up is it's going to keep the Sunday backup at 11 p.m. for 4 weeks for daily retention notice that you can't unselect that I want to keep it for 14 days so I'll have the daily at 10:00 p.m. and the backup that happens at 11:00 p.m. on Sunday for 4 weeks if I wanted to keep a monthly retention I could but I'm not going to in this example next is the specify backup schedule for files and folders this is set to daily by default so we have one at 11 p.m. I'm going to select one at 5:00 a.m. and I'll say one at 1:00 p.m. now the backup agent is going to backup three times a day at 5:00 a.m. 1 p.m. and 11 p.m. I'll click Next and how it's asked for the schedule so the first is the daily it's asking how long it's going to keep all three backups and I'm gonna set this for 30 days next is the weekly retention policy so the Sunday backup at 11:00 p.m. will be kept for 104 weeks I'm gonna change this to 6 here are the backups on the last Saturday of the month at 11 o'clock you can see I can change this or add these but I'm not going to do that and I'll keep that for 2 months yearly retention it's the same deal you can select which one Sunday of the last week in March or you can change that to whatever you want then select the backup time and the number of years for attention I'm going to uncheck that though I don't need yearly retentions and I'll click Next here's an option for creating the initial backup the default is to backup over the network so that's just gonna send all the data over the network there's an option here and I think it's listed as limited preview I could back up using data box but I don't have that so I'm going to leave it at is automatic over the network it's given me the confirmation information and I'll click finish and it's done so I'll click close now I have my backup policies in place you'll backup at 11:00 p.m. 5:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. it's not uncommon to want to back up outside of a normal backup schedule and you can do that by clicking backup now so I'm gonna select files and folders and it's gonna ask for a retention so I'm gonna back up until the 31st actually let's just change that to the 18th I'll click Next you can see it's backing up the folder I had already selected when I set up the schedule and I'll click backup now it's gonna walk through taking the snapshot of the volumes and then begin transferring data and the job is complete so I'm going to close this and come back to the portal I'm going to backup now you can see I have three backup items and if I go into backup items the list 1 Azure virtual machine and 2 Azure backup agents and the two agents I only have this installed on one server you can see the protected server but one agent for the C Drive and one for system state now if I go into the C Drive you can see I already have a recovery point listed so it's already showing that backup I'm gonna pause here so we can let some of those scheduled backups occur and I'll come back once that's finished I'm back and you can see we've got some backups that have finished and I also have an error so this was unexpected but it's good because it lets us see some of the details we can get from the Azure backup agent here you can see all my backups from yesterday completed one thing I'll point out is if we look at the detail there's not much we can see the detail of the last job but even that is kind of limited just tells us how much what was backed up and how much data transferred and if we go into this error it just says look at the event logs for me more detail so I went to the event logs and is the only one I could find it just says there was an error so that's not very helpful but I bring this up because there's another spot we can go I'm gonna go into my recovery services vault and backups here we can see we've got an error a couple here monitoring as well as backup jobs so let's take a look at this failed job there's our server and we can see that the status failed what the start time was so this is giving us a little bit more detail and it tells us that it couldn't perform a backup because there's already backup in progress now this is not uncommon for the first round of backups because it's backing up all the data I wouldn't a really expect it with a small amount but point being that you can see the details on the failed job within the azure portal not only can you see the failed job in the portal but you could also alert on that let's go back into the vault and go to back up alerts and configure notifications so I can turn this on add my email address here I can get a notification per alert or an hourly digest I can select the severity I want so if I wanted to get critical and warning I might want to do that / alert so I know when an error occurred that's how you set up alerting and Azure backup I'm actually gonna just discard this though I don't need alerts for this next I'm gonna restore a file to do that I'm gonna come back to the Microsoft Azure backup agent on the server and click on recover data I'll select this server will click Next I'm gonna recover an individual file or folder and I'll select the volume then it'll ask what backup I want so I'm gonna go back to yesterday the first at 1 p.m. and mount this is going to take a couple minutes to run but basically what it's doing is using the iSCSI service to mount a recover point as another drive on this machine and I'll be able to copy the files off that I need to recover well that's working let's go in to documents I'm just going to delete this file it's showing the recovery volume is available it's the D Drive and it also tells me that the availability time is limited so let's go into my file explorer here we can see I've got a new D Drive and remember I'm only backing up user data you may notice a little leg or delay when browsing the files on this recovery point because it is going to over the Internet to pull that data down so it all depends on internet connection there's the file that I'm looking to recover so I'm gonna copy that and then I'll go to the local Documents just paste it back there we go that's it to file recovery once I'm done I'll click unmount that's gonna remove that drive over here you can see that the last recovery has been updated for today that's how you recover data from the azure backup agent on the local machine the last thing I'm going to do is uninstall the backup agent in order to do that the first thing I'm going to do is go into backup items I'll go into my Azure backup agent and select one of these backup items with the server that I want to delete and I'm gonna click on this computer name notice a dot at the end before I do that I'm gonna copy that to the clipboard only that in a second I'm gonna go into that Here I am at the server and up here is an option to delete I'm going to click that okay I'm just gonna paste that server name in and I'm gonna select a reason and I'll just put in testing and the very last option is to delete the recovery points so this is confirming that I do not need this backup data' anymore that it's going to be gone I'll never get it back and I'm ok with that once I'm finished with that I'll click delete now if I come back to my backup items and I'll go into overview here it only shows one server and that's the azure server that I have backed up the last step is to uninstall the agent so I'm going to come back to the server I'll just close that I'll go to add/remove programs and this is just a simple uninstall I'll select the Microsoft Azure recovery service agent and uninstall all right be uninstall' is complete so that is how you add a backup agent to the server back up a server scheduled backups for the server troubleshoot backups do a recovery and then remove the agent some parting thoughts on the MARS agent before I go it is missing some features of an enterprise backup solution scheduled leanness configured on the client that would be difficult to manage in large environments there is no linux agent or application consistent backup both required for an enterprise backup solution there is some central management and reporting through the portal but that's limited to alerting the job status not included in the portal is the ability to configure multiple agents with that said the azure backup agent may be sufficient for small organizations or remote sites with limited number of computers it also augments Azure backup on Azure servers allowing for up to three backups a day and limiting the scope of the backup I hope you found this useful don't forget to subscribe and thanks for watching

Channel: Travis Roberts

Views: 10,368

Keywords: Azure, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, backup, Site Recovery, Recovery Services vault, AZ-103, AZ-300, AZ-301, AZ-900, Certification, Microsoft Certification, RPO, RTO, data retention, vss, restore, data recovery, snapsho, shadow copy, file recovery, MARS, Azure Backup Agent, MARS Agent

Id: sqLQvrsxeww

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 07 2019