In the previous post, we went through the same AKS cluster creation using the Azure CLI

Which one you choose will depend on your background and usage, if you are familiar with PowerShell then you might choose this option as you might be more familiar with the object output. There are lots of posts already out there around the Azure CLI vs Azure PowerShell here is one, but I am not going to get into that here.

Install Azure PowerShell

Spoiler Alert! To use Azure PowerShell, you are going to need to install it on your system. This article explains how to install the Azure PowerShell. Or before doing this confirm that you have it already installed by running the command in your PowerShell console.

# Connect to Azure with a browser sign in token
Connect-AzAccount

With the above command, you are either going to get a wall of red text saying module not found or you will be prompted to log in to your Azure portal. Alternatively, you can just check which modules you have installed with the Get-Module command.

Either way, you need to connect to your Azure Account and authenticate.

Authenticate to the account you wish to use and then you will see the following in the same browser.

Back in your PowerShell console, I am using Visual Studio Code to run through these commands I now see the following:

Variables

I generally want to define some variables before we begin creating our AKS cluster. We will use these variables later on in our commands and you will get the complete script linked at the bottom.

$ResourceGroupName = "CadeAKS"
$ClusterName = "CadeAKSCluster"
$ClusterLocation = "eastus"
$NodeCount = "3"

Creating the Azure Resource Group

Next, we need to create a new resource group for where our AKS cluster will be hosted. Broadly speaking the Azure resource group construct is a group where resources are deployed and managed, when creating a resource group, you define a location and a name. For more information, you can find that here.

#Create a New resource group
New-AzResourceGroup -Name $ResourceGroupName -Location $ClusterLocation

Creating your AKS Cluster

For this example, I will be using Azure PowerShell to also generate a new SSH Public Key, but if you wish to create or use an existing key then you can see the detailed process for creating that public SSH key here. The command to create your AKS cluster with your existing SSH key is as follows: Obviously pointing to the correct location of your SSH Key.

New-AzAksCluster -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -Name $ClusterName -NodeCount $NodeCount -SshKeyValue 'C:\\Users\micha\\.ssh\\id_rsa'

As I mentioned I will be creating a new cluster and with that also creating new SSH keys with the following command.

#Create the AKS cluster, GenerateSshKey is used here to authenticate to the cluster from the local machine.

New-AzAksCluster -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -Name $ClusterName -NodeCount $NodeCount -GenerateSshKey -KubernetesVersion 1.19.7

When this is complete you will get the cluster, information posted like below.

Accessing the Kubernetes Cluster

The first part to access is making sure you have the kubectl available on your system you can do this by running the below command.

#This will install Kubectl but i am not sure if this is needed if you already have kubectl on your system will have to test that.


Install-AzAksKubectl

Once you have this, we can now import the AKS cluster context to our kubectl configuration to access the cluster.

#Now we need to add our AKS context so we can connect


Import-AzAksCredential -ResourceGroupName $ResourceGroupName -Name $ClusterName -Force

Now if we check the kubectl config contexts

Deleting the AKS Cluster

When you have finished your testing, learning tasks then I would advise removing your cluster, do not just leave it running unless you really need to. By leaving it running you are going to be spending money and potentially lots of it.

When you are finished running the following command based on what we have created above.

#To Delete your cluster run the following command
Remove-AzResourceGroup -Name $ResourceGroupName -force

At this stage you might also want to delete that SSH Public Key we created above as well, and this can be done with the following command.

Remove-Item C:\Users\micha\.ssh\id_rsa

You might also find this repository on GitHub useful where I store my scripts for the above as well as Azure PowerShell which I will cover in another post.

Hopefully, this will be useful to someone, as always open for feedback and if I am doing something not quite right then I am fine also to be educated and open to the community to help us all learn.

I took the scientific approach over the weekend and asked if I should use Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell, the twitter-verse responded with their views and opinions on which one they use and why. Let’s rewind slightly we have 4 options when it comes to Microsoft AKS, Azure Portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell or using an ARM Template. ARM templates will come later along with Terraform, but I wanted to understand a little more about the components you needed to get up and running. If you didn’t respond, then head on over to Twitter and let me know your choices and why. Neither is the wrong answer.

I decided based on the thread and feedback that I should probably take both options and simply walk through the configuration. This post will cover Azure CLI and I will make sure I also walkthrough another post covering Azure PowerShell.

Getting Started with Azure CLI

Start by downloading the Azure CLI, I am using Windows but as always you have options for macOS and Linux all found in the same location. Another option is the Azure Cloud Shell which you may have if you are using the Windows Terminal. Now I believe that this is the same as Azure CLI but more details can be found here from Sarah Lean aka Techie Lass Blog.

Once you have the Azure CLI downloaded and installed when you open your PowerShell window you should be able to run the following command. This confirms that you have the Azure CLI now installed on your system. This also means that I can work with my Azure CLI from my PowerShell console rather than having to open the specific tab on Windows Terminal. If you run az version on your Azure Cloud Shell you will get something very similar which is why I think this is the same.

The first thing we need to do is connect to our Azure account. We can do this by running the following command.

#Web Browser will open to authenticate against your subscription


az login

This is going to open a new browser window which you will need to authenticate to gain access and be able to start building things.

Once you have authenticated your browser will report the following

I am using Visual Studio Code, once you have authenticated you will see your subscription ID as per below.

Creating the Azure Resource Group

Next, we need to create a new resource group for where our AKS cluster will be hosted. Broadly speaking the Azure resource group construct is a group where resources are deployed and managed, when creating a resource group you define a location and a name. For more information, you can find that here.

#Create a New resource group


az group create --name AKSResourceGroup --location eastus

With the above we have created a resource group in the EAST US by running the following command it will output a JSON file containing the Azure Region data. All geocode locations for Azure Regions are estimates. They do not represent the actual physical location for specific data centres.

az account list-locations > azure_regions.json

Creating your AKS Cluster

For this example, I will be using Azure CLI to also generate a new SSH Public Key, but if you wish to create or use an existing key then you can see the detailed process for creating that public SSH key here. The command than to create your AKS cluster with your existing SSH key is as follows: Obviously pointing to the correct location of your SSH Key.

#If you would like to use existing SSH keys


az aks create --resource-group AKSResourceGroup --name MyAKSCluster --node-count 3 --ssh-key-value C:\\Users\micha\\.ssh\\id_rsa

As I mentioned I will be creating a new cluster and with that also creating new SSH keys with the following command.

#If you would like to generate new SSH Keys


az aks create --resource-group AKSResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --node-count 3 --generate-ssh-keys

Once the above command is complete you are going to get a JSON output indicating what you have just built, that will look something like the following, In here you will notice some important aspects that you did not define but could do in the future to tailor your cluster to your requirements.

We are using Orchestrator version 1.18.14 you could define this with the following

[--kubernetes-version]

We are using a VM size of “Standard_DS2_v2” you could define this differently using the following

[--node-vm-size]

There are lots of other options as you can imagine spending some time here understanding some of those variables you could use.

Accessing the Kubernetes Cluster

Now we have our running AKS cluster we want to access this to start deploying our apps. First, we need to make sure we can access the cluster and to do this we need to run the following command. At this point, you need to make sure you have the kubectl installed on your system.

#Merge AKS Cluster with current Kubectl Configuration


az aks get-credentials --resource-group AKSResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster

you can then confirm this by running

#Confirm kubectl has new config


kubectl config get-contexts

At this stage, we have access to our cluster

If you are just getting started then I have to say that the Microsoft quickstarts are the place to be, super simple and easy walkthroughs. Some great examples of getting applications up and running from start to finish. You can find a link to a specific one on Azure CLI and AKS here.

Deleting the Kubernetes cluster

When you have finished your testing, learning tasks then I would advise removing your cluster, do not just leave it running unless you really need to. By leaving it running you are going to be spending money and potentially lots of it.

When you are finished running the following command based on what we have created above.

#Delete the Cluster


az group delete --name AKSResourceGroup --yes --no-wait

For peace of mind, you can then also double-check the portal to make sure all the resources within the resource group are also being deleted.

You might also find this repository on GitHub useful where I store my scripts for the above as well as Azure PowerShell which I will cover in another post.

Hopefully, this will be useful to someone, as always open for feedback and if I am doing something not quite right then I am fine also to be educated and open to the community to help us all learn.

One of the areas that I stumbled upon was having to enable something during the process to take advantage of the new team’s functionality above so wanted to document that also.

Firstly, head on over to the download link posted in the blog linked above this post will also give you a short overview on what you can expect in v5.

Once you have that downloaded, you are good to close down the console and begin the upgrade process, advice here is to make sure all jobs are finished and nothing is scheduled for the next 10 minutes maybe longer depending on the size of the environment.

Run through the pretty simple next next upgrade process.

Then open the console and check you have the correct version. By heading here.

By selecting the about option, you are going to then see this following screen to show you your build number and version.

This shows we have successfully updated our server to v5 and we can start protecting those Microsoft Teams objects.

But before we can do that especially if you are an existing Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 user then you will need to enable this option on the organisation.

What you are going to find is that the Microsoft Teams check box is unselected, if you wish to protect this within the organisation then select that checkbox

If you are a green field first time installation of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 and you are starting with v5 or newer, then when you add your organisation it is going to look like this.

You can see there that this is automatically selected.

As well as making things much faster when it comes to backing up the data but more importantly the granular recovery and speed of that recovery back into your Office 365 environment.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams data was already being protected when Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 was protecting your SharePoint Online environment, however when it comes to recovery it wasn’t as nice and granular to perform those recoveries. There was a great post back in 2019 talking about this way of protecting Teams data and restoring by Veeam Vanguard Falko Banaszek.

Now with v5 we have a much better way to not only capture the Microsoft Teams data but also a much faster way to recover granular items with the new Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Teams functionality.

In terms of what granular levels of recovery can we get to, well this would include your team channels, settings, permissions as well as those files and data also stored within Microsoft Teams. Then there is also the search functionality being able to search across chat and files to find the objects you require for recovery. Then for the final step of the restore you can either just grab individual files or grab multiple files and chats and restore those back to Microsoft Office 365.

The one thing not possible is backing up those GIFs but I feel the internet has a big repository of these some place already.

Proxy placement and deployment

With every Veeam release there is always a focus on Performance and Scalability, this release of v5 is no different. The ability to leverage concurrent tasks with SharePoint backup making those backups faster, but also around proxies and scalability, the number of supported proxies for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 has been increased by something silly like 5 times.

Prior to this release as well the proxies that deal with the movement of data between Microsoft Office 365 and the repository location had to be joined to a trusted domain the same as the Veeam Backup & Replication server, for most cases this is fine but there are some environments where this is not possible or wanted. V5 brings around the ability to now deploy those proxies in a non-domain joined fashion. Not only that but the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 management server also does not need to be joined to a domain. This really does enable complete flexibility and scalability in those required environments.

Cloud Field Day – Demo Time

For those that know me and the Veeam Product Strategy team you know we don’t leave home without the ability to perform a live demo, especially when it comes to Cloud Field Day and big events like that. Back earlier in 2020 when we were able to do a session there, we decided to show off Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 in general but also highlighting the features and functionality that have now arrived in v5 of the product.

You can see that demo below.

Free

A lot of us will be running our own personal Office 365, and for that we still have you covered with our community edition, this is going to enable you to protect your Office 365 data to either disk or directly to object storage. You can find out more of that here.

Release Notes

There is so much more than what I have just mentioned here in this post but as always I think we do a great job of noting down all of the What’s New features and functionality in the new releases here.

Download

You can download the update or the whole install file by using this link

I will also be recording the update process with my current v4 version of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 to this latest version, just to highlight some of these new features but also how super simple and easy the upgrade process is. You will find that appear here on my YouTube channel and alongside the existing Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 demos.

And what if I told you, this has been around for years with Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam have had this capability for a while now since 2016 in fact.

Primary use cases that we have seen have been,

Test and development

When you have the public cloud at your fingertips why not take advantage of it? Instead of having to purchase specific test and development environments. Also, perfect idea if you are looking to just see how certain apps and workloads are going to run in Microsoft Azure.

Data Migration

Let’s say you know where you are going and that is Microsoft Azure, how are you going to get those workloads there in a fast and efficient manner, Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure enables a fast way to restore those backups to the public cloud without compromising on keeping the restore points and more to the point the rollback is back to those production systems you also still have on premises.

Data recovery

We tend to talk about the bad failure scenarios, or we think nothing will happen to us and not really touch on the in between. What if you lost half your production virtualisation servers due to an outage of some description? What would you do? This feature within Veeam Backup & Replication enables you to restore some of your workloads from backups into Microsoft Azure you can then use an existing VPN or some other connectivity to join the environments and continue working or you could use VeeamPN to achieve this.

Walkthrough

In this YouTube video I walk through how easy and simple it is to get those image-based backups restored into Microsoft Azure as native Azure VMs for some of those use cases mentioned above. This also ties into the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure that was released this week.

Where should I run the conversion process?

I ran some tests for this one to determine for my lab where and what would be the best practice when it comes to restoring workloads into Microsoft Azure. Veeam offers a lot of choice when it comes to restore and how to assist when environmental challenges are in the way. Things like link speed to the public cloud due to location or other reasons for that. Also since the release of this feature back in 2016 there have also been many other enhancements and features added to Veeam Backup & Replication including the new Veeam Cloud Tier which gives us the ability to store our backups in Object storage, well we can also recover from those as well. This video linked below goes into more detail around where and what considerations you should take when looking to restore workloads to the public cloud.

Cloud Tier

It is only right that we have spoken about protecting native Azure VMs using the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure, we have spoken about getting your image based backups from either virtual or physical platforms that you have on premises or even in other public clouds to Microsoft Azure so I had to mention Cloud Tier or Capacity tier on how we can tier our backups or copy our backups into Microsoft Azure Blob Storage for either a long term retention or an offsite copy of your data.

Couple all these features together and we have a pretty dynamic and flexible way of being able to move data to from and within the public clouds.

If you have any questions or comments, feedback at all on the videos then please let me know either here in the comments, on the YouTube channel or on Twitter, a side note here is that I will be creating more video content over the next few weeks whilst we are stuck at home, I for one have been consuming a lot more of my news and education through YouTube and judging by the uptake in subscriptions I think you are too so let me know anything you want to see or for me to walk through.

What is Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure?

This new product focuses in on the Azure IaaS workloads you have running in the public cloud, much like the Veeam Backup for AWS edition that was released early this year, this product provides you the ability to protect those Azure VMs without having to install and agent on each one. It is a policy driven approach allowing for both snapshots and backups to be part of your data management plan when it comes to Microsoft Azure.

The product is a standalone solution that is deployable from the Microsoft Azure marketplace. A very easy to use wizard driven approach to configuration and management. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure Free Edition and subsequent versions are available within the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

The FREE edition allows you to protect 10 Azure VMs using native snapshots and then tier those snapshots to an Azure Blob Storage repository.

Within the Azure Blob Storage Repository these backups are stored in the portable data format that sets Veeam apart from the other vendors in this space. This allows for the Veeam Backup & Replication External Repository feature to be leveraged and enables the ability to further additional data protection or allow for other tasks such as migrations or on premises data recovery.

As you would expect the offering also allows you to recover those Azure Virtual Machines not only back where they initially resided but also across accounts and even across regions. As well as being able to provide file level recovery for a more granular option.

Another cool feature is the ability to see a level of cloud cost, when you create your policies through the wizard driven approach you have the ability to start seeing some cost forecasting so you can make better decisions about your cloud cost consumption.

Policies, Workers & Protected Data

Those familiar with Veeam will notice a different approach to some of the key functions and naming, and maybe you can liken these new terms with those found in Veeam Backup & Replication they have some differences.

Those familiar with Veeam Backup & Replication will recognise Policies as something more commonly known as Backup Jobs, however even within Veeam Backup & Replication world we are seeing policies now entering the fold with the CDP policy coming in later releases.

Policies give you the ability to define several requirements when it comes to your cloud data management. But again, it is that same very easy to use wizard driven approach that all Veeam customers will be familiar with.

You can choose to protect everything in a region, or we can be granular on what to protect. An awesome feature here is that you can select either by Instance or by Tag. Tags really lend well to the fast-moving pace of Cloud Instances being spun up and spun down all the time. The ability to use tags means we can protect in a more dynamic fashion. We will demonstrate the ease of use and how dynamic these tags within Azure can be created and used for your data management needs.

I mentioned above about Snapshots and Backups and how they are used together in this product to provide the best of both worlds when it comes to fast recovery points but also an out of band copy of your data not linked to the original VM.

You may wish on some workloads to only provide Snapshots and some only backups, or both. Snapshot settings allows you to define when these will be taken and how many snapshots you intend to keep. Backup Settings is where we can define that Microsoft Azure Blob Storage repository in which we wish to store those backups to, this will also play the part of making that data visible if you wish to see that within Veeam Backup & Replication. You also have the same retention setting to define here.

The workers are configured during the configuration stage and setup of the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure. Those familiar with Veeam Backup & Replication could maybe liken these worker nodes to the Veeam Backup Proxy component within VBR.

The worker is a Linux based instance that is deployed and used when data needs to be transferred, the worker is used for both backup and recovery. When the policy is complete then the workers are shut down but remain in place for the next scheduled policy to take place.

Cost Estimations

A unique feature that is built into the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure free edition and will obviously include other versions is the ability to estimate cost when it comes to backups and storing the retention you have defined. This is something else we go into further detail within the video walk-through below.

As I have mentioned this post gives a very high-level overview of what you can find with the new product but if you would like to see more then I have created a walk-through below. Any comments please comment here, on the YouTube video or find me on twitter.

Let me know what you think to the YouTube walk-through’s it is something I am intending to really increase given that we are house bound and I have more time to create this content.

I want to start by showing some of the major players in the Software as A Service (SaaS) market, I want to put an ask here, if you are using any of these SaaS based workloads and there is no native way to protect your data then I would like that feedback and to understand what that workload is and what areas and specific features would you like to see around that SaaS offering.

Office 365 the journey so far

Version 1 and 1.5 was completely concentrated on Office 365 mail and mitigating the risk against losing access to mail and recovering from many of the common issues we see.

• Accidently deleting of mail items
• Not understanding retention policies that are set by default and really any confusion when it comes to those offerings.
• Malicious activity
• External cyber attacks
• Outages – even the public clouds can have outages as we have seen over the last few years.

Two of the biggest improvements that were made in the update from 1 to 1.5 was firstly scale, this was one of the number one requests from those customers that had been testing and using the v1 of the product. Much to the same affect within Veeam Backup & Replication to increase scalability of the Veeam environment you could add multiple proxies or repositories to the Veeam Backup for Office 365 environment to increase the scale in which can be protected with that one single management interface. An additional aspect of scaling was the ability now to enable the Veeam VCSP reseller community to also offer Office365 Backup as A Service in a multi-tenant architecture.

Now to service both of those elements from a scale point of view, the large environment and the service provider an element of Automation and Self-Service Restore had to be also included into the 1.5 release. With both PowerShell and RESTful APIs exposed it allows for the chance to perform management, deployments and configuration backup jobs to run. It also allows enterprises and service providers to create their own self service restore console.

Veeam Backup for Office 365 v2

That’s enough about what’s already there and has been for the last 6 months let’s get onto what Veeam Backup for Office 365 v2 looks like as it was released today (July 24^th, 2018)

V2 brings two major new features, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

SharePoint Online

Let’s look at what can be protected here, SharePoint sites, personal sites, group sites, subsites. Classic & modern experience sites are both also supported. From a recovery perspective there is also the ability to use the same Veeam Explorer for SharePoint that can be used to recover on premises workloads that are running SharePoint and where they are protected by Veeam.

OneDrive for Business

The ability to backup OneDrive for Business users and groups with extended attributes including shared access are the capabilities of this new feature. When it comes to restore this introduces a new Veeam Explorer and one that specifically allows for granular restore but also bulk restore operations.

Another cool function as I am a heavy Office 365 user and a very heavy Microsoft OneNote user, this new version can backup and restore OneNote documents.

<Picture of Veeam Explorer for OneDrive>

Architecture

I now would like to close touching on how the architecture works now that we have added this new functionality.

Taken from the official slide deck is a simple yet scalable architecture looks at Veeam Backup for Office 365 v2.

The main component here is the VBO server and depending the size of environment will depend on how these components look from one server has them all or a distributed look at these components but always the infrastructure management is performed on that VBO server. We can then see the management console and the Veeam Explorers.

To bring the data from Office365 or this could also be used to protect Exchange 2016 instances on premises this is done by the VBO Proxy. Those proxies can be scaled out accordingly depending on the size of the environment.

We have those API services that can also be leveraged by third party tools to drive actions.

Finally, we have the repositories these are not your traditional Veeam backup repositories because these are storing data received from source to the Jet DB. This is Jet DB is the same format that is being used within Office365.

I am excited to see where this SaaS based protection model goes next, is it needed? Are there further Office 365 services that should be considered or as I said to begin with any of the other many SaaS services that are out there today? Get in touch and let me know @MichaelCade1

Well today I am back there at the home of English rugby to hear some more stuff from Microsoft. This event is two days though now, but I am only able to be there on the first day and to be honest this is the most relevant to me.

There are three tracks running during the day for the different audiences.

My intention is to arrive for a quick coffee and meet up with some industry peers I would think before heading down to the “Kubernetes & AKS” monster breakout session that if you check above is spanning the whole day.

AKS – Azure Container Service

AKS – Azure Container Service was brought out as preview at the end of October 2017, following on from ACS (Azure Container Service) (Because that’s not confusing!) AKS will be making it even easier to manage and operate your Kubernetes environments, all without sacrificing portability. This new service features an Azure-hosted control plane, automated upgrades, self-healing, easy scaling, and a simple user experience for both developers and cluster operators. With AKS, customers get the benefit of open source Kubernetes without complexity and operational overhead.

This is not a new thing from Microsoft within Azure the ACS version has been around since 2015 with support for multiple container orchestrators. AKS is focused on Kubernetes.

This session interested me because of the focus around containers, and I want to learn more about how Kubernetes looks and feels but also what workloads are people using them for? Stateful, stateless, what are the requirements for data availability?

The intention is probably to stay in this class till lunch time, hopefully from there I will have picked up enough new information on what Microsoft are doing in this space. And the nature of the class looks very similar to how it worked a couple of years back when they walked through creating a company within Azure, it was a great session.

“leading in the AI era – Industry scenarios”

After lunch I have marked off to go and see “leading in the AI era – Industry scenarios” the intent here is very similar. AI is a big new buzz word in the industry, don’t get me wrong there is something there and we are moving fast toward a more AI driven world. I wanted to hear in this short session what Microsoft are seeing in the industry, if I can also understand what workloads or data this then generates what is the availability or protection requirements here, this session will give me a good overview of that I believe.

At this point in the day the oracle on Azure doesn’t really interest me. And neither does the azure offers, so this will either be a good time to catch up with email or head back into the Kubernetes room for another hour.

Data Warehousing – Data Lakes

The last session I would like to catch is “Data Warehousing – Data Lakes” much like containers this is something I have been exploring specifically around Hadoop and big data use cases. One of the thing that really interests me here is the Internet of things for the business and the use case of all that data to be sent to a data lake for warehousing. I really want to hear what Microsoft have got to say about this but also this will help with some content I am working on around this area. Of course, we also want to understand more of the real-world use cases and the protection of this data or more to the point how can we better leverage this data.

For those that will make the second day, its more around the modern workplace, looks to be talking at the application layer and even devices. I will be heading from London up to Manchester where day one of IP Expo kicks off and I have a similar set of sessions and people I want to listen to and speak to.

You can find more information here on the event.

If you are at either, then come and say hi.