SAP on Azure - Backup and Restore takes a looks at how to backup and restore the main elements of an SAP workload: virtual machines and databases. This course focuses on data protection from an operational, maintenance, and compliance perspective and complements the high availability and disaster recovery course. Azure infrastructure gives you the freedom to implement various backup methods, like ones native to your particular brand of database engine. It also has built-in backup functionality designed to work with a wide range of data sources.
Microsoft Azure Backup Service has native support for virtual machines, SAP HANA, SQL Server, and Azure Files. This course introduces Azure's backup service and how it can be applied to SAP workloads.
Learning Objectives
- Get a foundational understanding of Azure Backup
- Learn how to configure Azure Backup Service for natively supported data sources
- Learn how to use Azure Backup Service with Oracle, a non-natively supported data source
Intended Audience
Anyone looking to understand and implement the backup and restore capabilities for their SAP workloads on Azure.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should have a basic understanding of Azure and SAP. Before taking this course, it is recommended that you take the Designing and Building a HADR for SAP Workloads on Azure course first.
Currently, there is no Azure backup service native support for Oracle databases. While this does not exclude you from using the Azure backup service, the process is somewhat more complicated. In summary, you'll need to create an operating system user called azbackup and add them to the same OS group as the one representing the Oracle SYSBACKUP role. Then create a database user op$azbackup mapped to the external azbackup user and grant the user sysbackup privileges. Create a file called workload.conf in the directory etc/azure with a section called workload, with the workload name of oracle, a configuration path pointing to etc/oratab, and a Linux user set to azbackup.
To back up an Oracle database in Azure Backup Service, select backup a VM. The workload.conf file tells the backup service that you want to back up a database. Azure Backup then runs the appropriate scripts to put the database in a consistent state before taking data disk snapshots.
To restore the database files, select file recovery from the VM backup menu. You'll be prompted to choose a recovery point, after which you can download a python script file to run on the VM. The script will mount the restored volumes, from which you can copy the database files to their original location on the VM and go through the process of restarting the Oracle instance.
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.