Many customers want to use Azure in a variety of scenarios, and
increasingly, it makes sense for storage, backups, and for defense
against on-premises ransomware attacks.
Hi, I'm Jeff Woolsey, and this is one in a series of videos
that shows you what's new in Windows Admin Center.
Windows Admin Center allows you to
streamline everyday tasks and
connect to Azure for hybrid scenarios.
In this video, Haley Rowland and I show you how to get started
from within Windows Admin Center.
Gain an overview of Azure Site Recovery,
Azure Backup to defend against ransomware attacks,
and Storage Replica. Let's get started.
Haley: So let's talk about how you can extend your on-premises
into Azure. And one of the main use cases for this that we
see customers ready to adopt, is for business continuity and
disaster recovery. And so we have three services
within Windows Admin Center integrated to help support this
so that you can use Azure as your secondary site
rather than setting up another set of hardware and paying for that.
So we'll talk about Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup, and Storage Replica.
So what are the differences between these?
Azure Site Recovery is really good if you have workloads
running on VMs. So you can actually just replicate those
into the cloud and you're only going to pay for compute
when you actually need to fail over and start up those VMs.
And then there's Azure Backup, which is good for backing up
system state and files and folders. And this is really good
because it gives you recovery points that you can kind of
roll back to, if you need to, which is really good for
preventing malicious deletion of data such as ransomware.
And finally, Storage Replica is really good if you want to do
server-to-server asynchronous or synchronous replication
using block-based storage. So let's take a look at what
those look like within Windows Admin Center.
Jeff: Absolutely. So in Azure Backup, you have the
ability to basically say, "Look, I just want to take
an OS instance and I just want to start backing up immediately."
And what’s cool is, it's really easy.
You basically come in here, you set: "What's my backup policy?
How often am I going to back up? How often am I going to--what's the
retention like?" But again, one of the biggest things we wanted to
do was we wanted to protect your data at the same time, and if
you look at the ransomware that's been out, it's not only
going after the OSes, but it's looking for your backup and it's
trying to delete those, or encrypt those as well, so you
cannot get to those. What we have done is,
when you actually create a backup in Azure,
in the workflow, we actually say give us a passphrase.
What that passphrase means is you put that in here and
when it's time to actually go delete a backup, for example,
and it's time to delete--guess what?
It won't let you delete it
unless you put in a passphrase. So when that
ransomware goes to delete your backups to try and make sure
they get you to pay, you can say,
"No, sorry. You can't get to my
backups because they're protected by a passphrase."
It's also just nice as having another check to make sure you don't
accidentally delete a backup that you didn't want in the
first place. So that's simply part
of that capability and of course,
we have ASR, Azure Site Recovery. The nice thing about
this is it's literally built right into... built right into the
VM tool so if you're running a bunch of VMs and you say
"You know what? I'd like to go ahead
and I'd like to replicate this."
OK, simply click on the VM. Select Protect VM. It's going to
come up with option that says, choose your subscription,
choose your region. Great, we’ll take care of
all of that. You basically
sign in and boom. In just a couple seconds,
you're instantly replicating.
I didn't need to crack open a manual. I didn't
need to crack open documentation. I didn't have to
have a secondary datacenter. What's interesting is when
I talked to folks that do DR, and I've been talking to these folks
for the last 10 years, people are in two camps. There is the
first camp is the people saying, “I don't have $100 million
to go buy and create a new datacenter, so I'm going to
use Azure.” And then there are people that have already spent
$100 million on that secondary datacenter and they go
“I want to get out of this thing. This is crazy. It's a money pit,
and I'm absolutely going to use Azure for my DR.”
Those are the two camps that I run into, and we've made it
literally this easy. Click on a VM, click on Protect, and you're
ready to go. Then we've got Storage Replica, and this is
great if you want to just do: "Hey, I need to do volume replication."
This is asynchronous and synchronous replication.
This is block-based so this is going to get,
you know, all of your storage covered here and in Admin Center,
you want to be able to create this. OK come right in here,
and you can set up Storage Replica. Now, one brand new
feature we just introduced in WAC 19--Admin Center 1910 that
we just released is, now it will actually
create a new Azure VM for you.
So before, you would set up Storage Replica, and if you wanted a
replica, you had to switch into Azure, create the VM,
and then set up the replica.
Now you can do all of this in Admin Center
without ever having to leave the Admin Center console.
You can say, "Hey, I want to replicate this."
OK, create the new VM.
We will handle the rest for you.
Awesome how we do that,
So that is about extending on premises into Azure.