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>> Hey. Azure Advisor gives me
personalized recommendations
based on the Well-Architected Framework,
so I can better use my cloud resources. Why don't we take a look?
Let's go to "Advisor", right over here.
I'm going to click on "All Recommendations", let's see.
This one says Enable virtual machine replication to protect
your applications from regional outages. I wonder what that means.
I wish I could go to some Advisor Clinic. Maybe I can.
Well, I have Travis Maier
here and I suspect you know what this means.
Hey, Travis, I know what backup is,
but I'm not quite sure what this is trying to tell me when it says
enable virtual machine replication. What's going on here?
>> Hey, no problem David.
In addition to backup,
a lot of our customers are really focused on
disaster recovery and making
sure that our workloads are redundant,
and not just backed up.
Meaning that if we had a planned or unplanned type of outage.
Maybe it's plan meaning that it's happening
because we're doing upgrades to different applications,
or we're testing our disaster recovery,
but it may be unplanned as well.
Some natural disaster or things of that nature.
In those cases, what we want to be able to do is
introduce resiliency in the form of
being able to access
backups that are in another region and to make those
come online as quickly as possible to make
sure that we reduce downtime to the extent possible.
>> That makes total sense. How do I do this?
>> Yeah, why don't we take a look at an example deployment here.
What you'll see here is that we are currently
deployed in the West US region.
In this case, we're just using a single VM,
and we want to make sure given our policy in
an example corporation that we'd be able to,
in the event of a disaster,
failover to another region.
In this case, what we've done,
we've selected that East US region and it's actually very simple.
You can see here that I'm just an example VM,
I've selected the target region.
We're already in West US.
What we're able to do after that is set
the exact policy that we want when that failover takes place.
The interesting thing here is that there's
a lot of different configuration.
We probably won't go into a ton of detail here,
but you can see that you are able to select
your target settings for the new region in this case, East US.
What we're going to do is select
the "Subscription", the resource group.
But you can also have flexibility around
the virtual network that you're going to be failing over
to assuming that you'll have to replicate
many different enterprise applications and
Active Directory and DNS and things of that nature,
you can set the virtual network to accommodate for that.
>> That makes total sense.
I think in my experience people are
really good at setting up disaster recovery,
but they are not so great at
knowing whether what they've set up works.
Do we have a way to help with that?
How do you know once you've set this
up that it's doing what you want it to?
>> Absolutely. This is one of my favorite features.
I know that a lot of people have no problem setting it up,
but they want to have that confidence in hand that when
the disaster hits or when an unplanned event happens,
that they're going to be able to have
full confidence that the failover is going to take place.
Actually, within our configuration,
we offer the ability to test those failovers.
There's both human testing as well
as testing within the service itself.
What you can see here again,
pretty simplified view of this,
we're failing over from West US to East US,
and we're selecting the recovery point that we want to use.
Maybe there were some specific changes
that were made in the application or a
VM and we want to select a specific recovery point.
We'll then select the virtual network as we discussed earlier,
and kick off the test failover.
In this example on the right-hand side,
I've already kicked off that failover,
and you can see here that we have
individual itemized processes that take place.
What you can see here also is that took
just over two minutes for us to fully failover to that new region.
We can just highlight here that we do have existing VMs in
that region that have been backed up from
our West US location and those have been activated,
they're online and they have shown successful here.
Typically our customers are also
going to take this a step further.
Their RDP into the actual VMs
and make sure that everything is meeting their needs.
>> That's really cool.
I think now I have a better understanding of what this looks like.
I have to say, I really dig the fact
that you can see how long it takes
because that's often something people don't have a good sense of.
Thank you very much, Travis, for coming
and thank you all for watching this.
I really appreciate you joining us here on
this episode of Advisor Clinic in the Azure Enablement Show.
Join us next time for another great episode.
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