An important aspect of any Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) environment is ensuring you have a backup and a disaster recovery plan. To get the most out of this cloud-hosted service, it is important to ensure you are utilizing a robust and efficient solution to facilitate backup and DR. This will give a much better experience for your users.
This course will help you plan and implement business continuity plans for your Azure Virtual Desktop and allow you to understand how it integrates with the other Azure native backup and DR services.
Learning Objectives
- Plan and implement a disaster recovery plan for Azure Virtual Desktop
- Design a backup strategy for Azure Virtual Desktop
- Configure backup and restore for FSLogix user profiles, personal Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and golden images
Intended Audience
This course is intended for anyone who wants to become an Azure Virtual Desktop Specialist and is preparing to take the AZ-140 exam.
Prerequisites
If you wish to get the most out of this course, it is recommended that you should have a good understanding of Azure administration, however, this is not essential.
Welcome to this module on configuring backup and restore for FSLogix user profiles, personal virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and golden images. In this module we will cover the following topics:
- How to backup Azure File shares
- Golden Image backup options
Let’s start off by discussing how we can backup the Azure File share that we utilize for our FSLogix user profiles. The first step is that we need to create a recovery services vault. This is a management entity that stores recovery points that have been created over time.
It provides an interface to perform backup-related operations These include taking on-demand backups, performing restores, and creating backup policies.
We can configure a backup in a few different ways. For multiple file shares we can use the recovery services vault. This is done from the recovery services vault pane within the Azure Backup service. Another option is to configure a backup from the Azure file share pane.
Let’s finish off this module by discussing golden image backup options. When creating the golden image from within the Azure portal, you can snapshot the VM which will store the image and will form your backup for the golden image.
You need to ensure you snapshot the VM image after all the patching is completed, after all the apps are installed, but before you run the sysprep. Then when it comes to updating the golden image with future patching and app updates, you boot to the snapshot, update the image and follow the same process to back this up again.
Shabaz Darr is a Senior Infrastructure Specialist at Netcompany based in the UK. He has 15 years plus experience working in the IT industry, 7 of those he has spent working with Microsoft Cloud Technologies in general, with a focus on MEM and IaaS. Shabaz is a Microsoft MVP in Enterprise Mobility with certifications in Azure Administration and Azure Virtual Desktop. During his time working with Microsoft Cloud, Shabaz has helped multiple public and private sector clients in the UK with designing and implementing secure Azure Virtual Desktop environments.