MrWu Posted March 6, 2015 Posted March 6, 2015 hi Has anyone experience using Azure services (in terms of school pricing and implementation) for : 1) AD Synchronization (for Office 365 mainly) 2) Disaster recovery (ie a VM snapshot of the SIMS server that can spool up if the main SIMS server goes down in school) Looked at MS website but very confusing in pricing (£3.66 per user for Azure AD sounds a lot) many thanks!
EduTech Posted March 9, 2015 Posted March 9, 2015 hi Has anyone experience using Azure services (in terms of school pricing and implementation) for : 1) AD Synchronization (for Office 365 mainly) 2) Disaster recovery (ie a VM snapshot of the SIMS server that can spool up if the main SIMS server goes down in school) Looked at MS website but very confusing in pricing (£3.66 per user for Azure AD sounds a lot) many thanks! Azure Active Directory is FREE to anyone unless you want to use the Premium Services in which case you will pay a per monthly fee for that, but that is because of the features that come with AAD Premium. If your just looking for AD Synchronization for Office 365 all this is FREE so you don't need to worry about that. In terms of DR this all depends on what you are looking for, and that comes under resources and so depending what solution your going with the cost (online) will reflect such. although if you have an Enterprise Agreement it is some what cheaper. James. 3
dhicks Posted March 9, 2015 Posted March 9, 2015 In terms of DR this all depends on what you are looking for, and that comes under resources and so depending what solution your going with the cost (online) will reflect such. although if you have an Enterprise Agreement it is some what cheaper. Looking at Azure's pricing calculator, a running Windows VM with a processor, 3.5GB of RAM and 50GB of SSD harddrive space is around £70 a month, plus bandwidth (maybe £30 a month?). That's a running VM, for a diaster recovery solution you'd only have to actually run that if there was a problem. Are "block blobs" storage that can be attached to Windows VMs as virtual harddrives? If so, they would seem to cost around 2p per GB per month. I couldn't find any cheaper snapshot storage ("backup" storage seemed to be more expensive, for some reason). At a very rough guess, if you did away with any domain controllers and used Azure's Active Directory service you could host the average school's half-a-dozen or so virtual servers for around £1,000 a month. I'm not exactly sure what the monthly running costs of our server cupboard are but with hardware costs, power and cooling, £1,000 a month is probably not bad. 1
MrWu Posted March 9, 2015 Author Posted March 9, 2015 Thanks guys; So I take it the 'Basic' free package for Azure AD will cover Office 365 use (if internet breaks at school we have AD authentication) Storing a standby VM seems sensible and only using bandwidth when spooled up, have to look into how we can update the snapshot (for say SIMS) as a back up so the stndby image is fiarly up to date.
EduTech Posted March 9, 2015 Posted March 9, 2015 Yes, Azure AD Free is what you get when you sign up for any Microsoft Online Service such as Office 365 and if you use Directory Sync w/ Password Sync then if systems should fail on-premise you will still be able to access Online Resources. It is also important to note in terms of bandwidth that you only pay for Incoming bandwidth, Outbound Bandwidth is included in the cost of the VM. 2
dhicks Posted March 9, 2015 Posted March 9, 2015 Yes, Azure AD Free is what you get when you sign up for any Microsoft Online Service such as Office 365 and if you use Directory Sync w/ Password Sync then if systems should fail on-premise you will still be able to access Online Resources. Okay, so Azure AD is free, how would we go about getting ready-to-run snapshots of our virtual machines onto Azure on, say, a daily basis? What storage would we need to place it in - "block blob" storage, or something else? Is there some way of transmitting diffs only for snapshots so we don't pay excessive amounts for bandwidth each month? 1
MrWu Posted March 10, 2015 Author Posted March 10, 2015 Good question on the VM, I presume a DPM style upload to Azure standby VM?
dhicks Posted March 10, 2015 Posted March 10, 2015 Good question on the VM, I presume a DPM style upload to Azure standby VM? We currently use XenServer, I'm guessing a move to a system where we could move or mirror VMs between Azure and local servers would mean using Hyper-V instead. Do we just install a Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V host, add it to some kind of local cloud that takes care of pooling processor and disk resources and then get presented with a nice simple user interface that allows us to run either run VMs locally and have them mirrored to Azure in case of disaster or simply run a VM directly on Azure?
dhicks Posted March 10, 2015 Posted March 10, 2015 Do we just install a Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V host, add it to some kind of local cloud that takes care of pooling processor and disk resources and then get presented with a nice simple user interface that allows us to run either run VMs locally and have them mirrored to Azure in case of disaster or simply run a VM directly on Azure? Looking at Azure's pricing calculator, that does seem to be pretty much it. £40 (including VAT) per month for each VM instance run locally but mirrored to Azure for diaster recovery. I reckon 6 VM instances at £240 per month and around 18TB of storage (6TB for file storage, double that for versioned backups) for around £500 per month.
EduTech Posted March 12, 2015 Posted March 12, 2015 Hi, In terms of the DR question, are you just looking for this, as it sounds like it would cater for your needs... : Site Recovery - Cloud disaster recovery | Microsoft Azure if so the cost of this would be: Azure Site Recovery to customer owned sites : £9.7744/month per instance protected Azure Site Recovery to Azure : £32.99/month per instance protected *Price correct at time of post James. 2
dhicks Posted March 12, 2015 Posted March 12, 2015 In terms of the DR question, are you just looking for this, as it sounds like it would cater for your needs... : Site Recovery - Cloud disaster recovery | Microsoft Azure Indeed - that's the question I'm trying to figure out, is that service going to provide the features I'm aiming for? I know what I want: I run a bunch of virtual machines on local physical servers, and some kind of lovly simple just-enable-it-and-it-works system takes care of mirroring those VMs to an offsite location, hopefully in as near to real-time as possible. As soon as a VM (or a whole physical server) breaks, the remote service notices and spins up a running VM. Users never notice. We currently run XenServer, with DRBD providing the mirroring of block devices from one server to another. This can provide sub-second failover in case of hardware failure, but I have to manually configure the darned thing and I'd have to look at managing the offsite physcial hardware myself, too - Azure does seem rather simpler.
Simcfc73 Posted March 12, 2015 Posted March 12, 2015 I have Azure backup running on my DPM at present but just for backing up the DPM server DB as I wanted to see how much it cost. Currently at £7.45 for 55GB May try a VM but I suppose that is using the VM backup rather than the storage backup. 1
pow Posted March 14, 2015 Posted March 14, 2015 I was thinking of spinning a DC up on Azure, a core 2012 R2 machine that would basically hold a backup of our DCs if everything went belly up... We have offsite file backup at the moment but recovering a without another DC is always a tricky one!
MrWu Posted March 16, 2015 Author Posted March 16, 2015 I'm going to present an overview from all the good help I have in this thread, thanks all This I will take to my Bursar meeting 1
dhicks Posted March 16, 2015 Posted March 16, 2015 Actually, AWS seem to have a comparable service, possibly a bit cheaper: AWS Storage Gateway - Connecting On-premise to the Cloud You can mirror VMs to AWS' cloud, ready to run in case of diasaster. If I have this right, and converting from US dollars to UK pounds: £85 per mopnth for the storage gateway £95 per month for 1.5TB of VM disk image storage £80 per month for 4TB of file storage That's around £260-ish per month - call it £300 to be on the safe side. It would still need a move to VMWare or Hyper-V, but unlike Azure we could store all our VM images as pricing is by storage size, not individual VMs. 3
Simcfc73 Posted March 18, 2015 Posted March 18, 2015 Actually, AWS seem to have a comparable service, possibly a bit cheaper: AWS Storage Gateway - Connecting On-premise to the Cloud You can mirror VMs to AWS' cloud, ready to run in case of diasaster. If I have this right, and converting from US dollars to UK pounds: £85 per mopnth for the storage gateway £95 per month for 1.5TB of VM disk image storage £80 per month for 4TB of file storage That's around £260-ish per month - call it £300 to be on the safe side. It would still need a move to VMWare or Hyper-V, but unlike Azure we could store all our VM images as pricing is by storage size, not individual VMs. And you probably get around paying tax like they do.
dhicks Posted March 18, 2015 Posted March 18, 2015 And you probably get around paying tax like they do. Good point, I can't remember if I added VAT to that figure, so it might be a bit more. Just looking at how AWS S3 works, it's a key-based store - you could backup a disk image by writing blocks of harddrive data as individual S3 items, then update an EBS image with the latest ready-to-run version of the disk image for diaster recovery purposes.
Dave_O Posted April 5, 2015 Posted April 5, 2015 I have Azure backup running on my DPM at present but just for backing up the DPM server DB as I wanted to see how much it cost. Currently at £7.45 for 55GB May try a VM but I suppose that is using the VM backup rather than the storage backup. How do you go about getting this service?
MrWu Posted April 8, 2015 Author Posted April 8, 2015 I have been on the phone to MS regarding the Azure Site to Azure site recovery It is a bit like having Windows 2012 r2 Hyper V replication to another building but Azure handles the replication it is charged at fixed rate of £33 per instance and you wont get charged for the replication data, only when the VM is spooled up (first 5GB is free, 4p per Gb thereafter)
dhicks Posted April 8, 2015 Posted April 8, 2015 it is charged at fixed rate of £33 per instance That's for instances under 100GB, you pay per GB for storage over that. 1
MrWu Posted April 8, 2015 Author Posted April 8, 2015 Thanks dhicks, they did not mentioned that ! we do a bit of digging
dhicks Posted April 10, 2015 Posted April 10, 2015 £80 per month for 4TB of file storage That is, of course, EC2 storage, which isn't a traditional file system. However, Amazon are now (or shortly-ish, anyway) doing file systems: Amazon EFS
matt40k Posted April 10, 2015 Posted April 10, 2015 It is also important to note in terms of bandwidth that you only pay for Incoming bandwidth, Outbound Bandwidth is included in the cost of the VM. Other way round mate - data going into Azure data centers: Free Pricing - Data Transfers | Microsoft Azure Also believe you don't get charged if you go over the VPN? Very important note is you pay for when your server is allocated, ie switched on, so you can throw your backups up as blobs then when\if your on-prem hardware goes pop, just hit the virtual power button and start the Azure meter running - just remember to switch it off at night to keep the costs down. As for backups, I believe veeam has an addon.
MrWu Posted April 14, 2015 Author Posted April 14, 2015 I do have concerns with MS as usual, they always have great product in theory but I have tried to contact them for a simple question (ie if my VM is over 100GB what is the cost etc) and so far even with a sales call I need to leave a message to call back and they never do.
MrWu Posted April 14, 2015 Author Posted April 14, 2015 Had a knowledgeable MS Chap who called me today, this is what I have been advised: Per Instance of VM protected (£32.99 / month) This is a fixed cost per instance, no matter the size of VM (however be aware of 127GB OS disk limitation) Replication is free of charge day to day The running cost comes in when your primary VM goes down and you need to spool up the VM in Azure, Dependent on the machine spec as decided by MS: Say extreme case a G series machine required to run SIMS 4 cores 66GB RAM 768GB SSD that would cost 81p / hour to run Upload data is still free Download up to 5GB is free, thereafter 0.053p per GB (1 GB-1TB Tier pricing ) 1
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