The course is part of this learning path
High availability and disaster recovery are key to ensuring reliable business continuity. While SAP workloads are mainly confined to Azure's infrastructure layer, it is still possible to utilize many Azure functions and features to enhance system reliability with relatively little effort. This course looks at when, where, and how to use Azure's built-in infrastructure redundancy to improve system resiliency and how various database high availability options are supported.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the key aspects of high availability and disaster recovery
- Learn about availability and availability zones
- Learn about Azure Site Recovery and how to implement it through the Azure portal
- Learn how to set up an internal load balancer in the context of SAP workloads
- Understand the Azure support options for Pacemaker and STONITH
- Learn how to implement Data Guard mirroring via the Azure CLI
- Set up Windows Failover Cluster and SQL Server Always On through the Azure portal
Intended Audience
This course is intended for anyone who wants to use Azure's built-in infrastructure redundancy to enhance the reliability and resiliancy of their SAP workloads.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should be familiar with Azure, Azure CLI, SAP, SQL Server, and STONITH.
Configuring SAP high availability and disaster recovery in an Azure environment is different from many other workloads as it is implemented on multiple levels. Not only is SAP multi-tiered, requiring different approaches for databases and application layers, but Azure Infrastructure as a service features need to work hand in glove with SAP and database high availability and disaster recovery functionality. Then these two multilevel architectures are superimposed across geographically disparate infrastructure. From an infrastructure point of view, there is overlap between functionality and geography. Most notably, the interplay between Proximity Placement Groups and, Availability Sets versus Availability Zones.
Availability Sets mitigate localized failures within a data center due to hardware or OS update outages through a maximum of 3 fault and 20 update domains. Availability Sets are deployed within Proximity Placement Groups. No particular infrastructure needs to be deployed to support Availability Sets. Availability Zones protect against an entire data center failure by spreading infrastructure across adjacent data centers that share a low latency high-speed network. Proximity Placement Groups do not span Availability zones. Load balancing needs to be implemented to support VM's deployed in a zone configuration. Proximity Placement groups are mirrored in each data center participating in an Availability Zone. Availability Zone is the most disparate configuration that will practically support synchronous replication and high availability. Protecting against an entire Azure region outage involves asynchronous replication and falls under the disaster recovery domain.
Azure Site Recovery is the preferred method for agnostically replicating virtual machines so that a standby copy can be manually spun up in the event of a primary server failure.
Azure supports most databases' native high availability solutions. Most notably, Microsoft SQL Server Always On functionality, Oracle Data Guard, and HANA System Replication.
Hallam is a software architect with over 20 years experience across a wide range of industries. He began his software career as a Delphi/Interbase disciple but changed his allegiance to Microsoft with its deep and broad ecosystem. While Hallam has designed and crafted custom software utilizing web, mobile and desktop technologies, good quality reliable data is the key to a successful solution. The challenge of quickly turning data into useful information for digestion by humans and machines has led Hallam to specialize in database design and process automation. Showing customers how leverage new technology to change and improve their business processes is one of the key drivers keeping Hallam coming back to the keyboard.