Sunday, July 17, 2016

Disaster Recovery for SharePoint farms in Microsoft Azure IaaS using Azure Recovery Services

I had to implement Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy to one of my SharePoint farms deployed in Microsoft Azure. I used Azure Recovery Services to achieve the goal in addition to SharePoint site collection backups.

Following are the steps I used to create a recovery vault in my Microsoft Azure environment to protect my Virtual Machines

1. Look for Recovery Services vaults in Azure portal

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2. Create a new vault

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3. Select if you need locally redundant or geo-redundant storage. I selected locally redundant storage as my budget was limited

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4. In this section we are creating a new Backup policy for Virtual Machines

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5. In backup policy, specify required retention

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6. Add virtual machines to the backup policy

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7. Click on backup jobs to see the current status

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8. We can see the backup configuration task has completed

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9. But that’s not all. We have to execute the initial backup. Click on Azure Virtual Machines node to navigate to check current status

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10. We have to select one Virtual Machine at a time to execute the initial backup

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11. Once we run the initial backup job for each and every Virtual Machine in our SharePoint farm, we can see a result similar to the following

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12. Once it is backed up according to the schedule, we can check the latest restore point as shown below

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That is the easiest way to implement disaster recovery for a SharePoint farm hosted in Microsoft Azure.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

SharePoint 2013 in Azure IaaS–Map public url to internal DNS

One of my SharePoint environments was recently deployed in Microsoft Azure IaaS. I have following servers in that environment

  • Active Directory
  • SQL Server
  • Analysis Services Server
  • SharePoint Server

I have deployed the farm accordingly and created host named site collection using public URL “portal.contoso.com”.

I used following command to create the host based site collection

New-SPSite 'https://portal.contoso.com' -HostHeaderWebApplication 'https://portal.contoso.com' -Name 'Portal' -Description 'Portal' -OwnerAlias 'SP\SP_Admin' -language 1033 -Template 'BLANKINTERNETCONTAINER#0'

Then I mapped the public IP of the SharePoint server with my external DNS. Thereafter my SharePoint site is accessible from outside as below

But the public URL was not accessible within my server farm (e.g SharePoint server, or Analysis Services Server), And I need to have a more concrete solution than host files.

Following are the steps I used

1. Log in to domain controller and navigate to DNS Manager. Right click on Forward Lookup Zones and create new

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2. Create new A record to SharePoint server

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3. Test the connectivity

First clear the DNS cache

  • ipconfig /flushdns

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That’s all we have to do. In the same way I had to map public URLs of my analysis services as well.