Author: rlevchenko

Disaster Recovery and Replication for Hyper-V VMs using Altaro VM Backup

If you are responsible for virtualized workloads using Hyper-V, ensuring the highest possible availability and minimising downtime should be one of your biggest priorities. Experiencing a loss in a business-critical application or service can result in an interruption in services affecting the ability to carry out work and affect your reputation as a reliable service provider.

Altaro VM Backup is a fast, reliable, and easy to use backup solution for virtualized workloads and features disaster recovery (DR) and replication which can drastically reduce downtime when the unexpected occurs. Altaro prides itself on its industry-leading support, however, knowing the basics of DR and replication can be hugely valuable in getting the most out of the software.

This whitepaper explains how to secure critical business operations and ensure availability of critical VMs in your infrastructure using Altaro and Public Cloud technologies. It covers everything you need to get started including:

  • Defining RPOs and RTOs
  • How to set up replication and conduct the initial replication
  • How to monitor replication jobs
  • How to failover to a DR site

Download the White Paper

Azure Policy: Append multiple tags

Howdy, here is an example of the custom Azure Policy that is based on Append policy action that automatically adds additional fields to the requested resource during creation or update. A common example is adding tags on resources such as costCenter or specifying allowed IPs for a storage resource. This policy appends specified tags and values on resources, so you can easily group them in order to get their consumption and costs, for example. Although the policy has default tags name and values, you can provide your own during the policy assignment.

TIP: Different versions of json files for PowerShell and deploying policy with Portal are available in my Github repo

This sample is for deploying policy with Azure Portal:

{
    "mode": "Indexed",
    "parameters": {
        "tagName1": {
            "type": "String",
            "metadata": {
                "displayName": "Tag Name1",
                "description": "Name of the tag, such as 'environment'"
            },
            "defaultValue": "environment"
        },
        "tagValue1": {
            "type": "String",
            "metadata": {
                "displayName": "Tag Name1 Value",
                "description": "Value of the tag, such as 'production'"
            },
            "defaultValue": "production"
        },
        "tagName2": {
            "type": "String",
            "metadata": {
                "displayName": "Tag Name2",
                "description": "Name of the tag, such as 'service'"
            },
            "defaultValue": "service"
        },
        "tagValue2": {
            "type": "String",
            "metadata": {
                "displayName": "TagName2 Value",
                "description": "Value of the tag, such as 'webapps'"
            },
            "defaultValue": "webapps"
        },
        "tagName3": {
            "type": "String",
            "metadata": {
                "displayName": "Tag Name3",
                "description": "Name of the tag, such as 'project'"
            },
            "defaultValue": "project"
        },
        "tagValue3": {
            "type": "String",
            "metadata": {
                "displayName": "Tag Name3 Value",
                "description": "Value of the tag, such as 'POC'"
            },
            "defaultValue": "POC"
        }
    },
    "policyRule": {
        "if": {
            "allOf": [
                {
                    "field": "[concat('tags[', parameters('tagName1'), ']')]",
                    "exists": "false"
                },
                {
                    "field": "[concat('tags[', parameters('tagName2'), ']')]",
                    "exists": "false"
                },
                {
                    "field": "[concat('tags[', parameters('tagName3'), ']')]",
                    "exists": "false"
                }
            ]
        },
        "then": {
            "effect": "append",
            "details": [
                {
                    "field": "[concat('tags[', parameters('tagName1'), ']')]",
                    "value": "[parameters('tagValue1')]"
                },
                {
                    "field": "[concat('tags[', parameters('tagName2'), ']')]",
                    "value": "[parameters('tagValue2')]"
                },
                {
                    "field": "[concat('tags[', parameters('tagName3'), ']')]",
                    "value": "[parameters('tagValue3')]"
                }
            ]
        }
    }
}

To assign the policy by using PowerShell:

# Create the Policy Definition (Subscription scope)
$policyrules = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rlevchenko/stuff/master/Azure/Policy/PS/appendtags-rules.json"
$policyparams = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rlevchenko/stuff/master/Azure/Policy/PS/appendtags-parameters.json"
$definition = New-AzPolicyDefinition -Name 'Append Multiple Tags' -Policy $policyrules  -Parameter $policyparams -Mode Indexed

# Set the scope to a resource group; may also be a resource, subscription, or management group
$scope = Get-AzResourceGroup -Name 'mvphero'

# Create the Policy Assignment
New-AzPolicyAssignment -Name 'Apply multiple tags' -DisplayName 'Apply tags and their default values' -Scope $scope.ResourceId -PolicyDefinition $definition

And this is how it looks from Azure Portal during the policy assignment:

The tags added by policy on NSG resource: