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backup and recovery for AAG on Azure VM

sakuraime 2,321 Reputation points
2020-09-17T02:59:29.553+00:00

Recovery Services vault is able to backup database on the SQL installed on VM , as well as AAG.
Suppose i am having 3 nodes AAG , 2 on east asia , 1 on south east asia.

if somehow, I will need to use the backup(maybe rebuild the whole AAG) from east asia, and restore database to the node on south east asia , how can we do that ?

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines

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  1. prmanhas-MSFT 17,901 Reputation points Microsoft Employee
    2020-09-22T19:48:23.35+00:00

    @sakuraime As per confirmation from our internal team based on the Azure Backup documentation, the Recovery Services vault HAS to be in the same region as the VM in order for the backup to work.

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-sql-server-database-azure-vms#create-a-recovery-services-vault

    Currently cross region backup from Recovery Vault is not supported.

    You can provide it as feedback on our forum :

    https://feedback.azure.com/forums/223579-azure-portal

    Hope it helps!!!

    Please 'Accept as answer' if it helped, so that it can help others in the community looking for help on similar topics

  2. prmanhas-MSFT 17,901 Reputation points Microsoft Employee
    2020-09-24T06:29:29.337+00:00

    @sakuraime As pointed out previously, generally cross-region backup and restore aren’t supported – both vault and node(s) need to be in the same region for backups and restores to happen.

    However, there is a provision of cross-region restore (currently in preview) in case of paired regions, which is the case here – East Asia and SouthEastAsia. While this is a feature meant to ensure availability; it can potentially help with your use case as well. Refer to this link for more details. Basically you need to enable Cross-region restore at the vault level (only possible for GRS redundancy). This way your backups keep replicating to the paired secondary region and you can trigger restore to the secondary region whenever you want (we use RA-GRS internally to enable this). Although, I am not sure why would you need to restore the backups to another node in the AG.

    To freely move backup data around any 2 regions, you can make use of Restore as Files – again not directly, but there are ways around it.

    Another point is that while you can back up a database in an AG, but at the time of restore, it is only restored as a standalone database; you can then build into an AG.

    Hope it helps!!!

    Please 'Accept as answer' if it helped, so that it can help others in the community looking for help on similar topics