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I have customers whose IFS Applications installations are on MS Azure VM, not IFS managed cloud.
Now I should propose "backup strategy" to these customers. Since Azure VM is totally different from local servers, I wonder what resources should be backed up and how often.

Could you please share your opinion about Azure VM backup?

Thank you.
Kazu

Hi @CheKazuAz,
If you are referring to backing up IFS MWs please refer to standard IFS Middleware Server Backup as per IFS Technical documentation. Taking VM backups may have different techniques or comments from other experts but then the concern would not be directly inclusive for IFS Application support perspective but environment specific.
Best Regards,
Yasas


Hi Yasas,

Thank you for your comments.

I need to think about both IFS MWS server and DB server as well.

I think VM backup can be restored totally as it was. So IFS MWS, that doesn’t have any user data, VM backup is good to it. But how about DB server? Do we need to set up Archive log mode? VM backup is not efficient? Please let me hear your opinion.

Thank you.

Kazu


Hi @CheKazuAz,
For IFS MWS server recommendation is as per IFS technical documentation.
I think the best to answer on the DB backups would be a Database Administrator and on the VMs would be a system engineer, hence you will need to decide that internally depending on the system. I have seen many customers using RMAN (DB backups), with regular database backups and weekly server / MWS backups (you will need to carefully schedule this not to cause interruptions / VM freezes due to too many processing). Hence this could totally depend on your requirements and data synch schedules / system setup etc. More experts might have other suggestions hence hope you may get additional comments :)
Best Regards,
Yasas


Hi @CheKazuAz

 

1. DB Backups 

Yes, you can enable archive log mode and can enable RMAN incremental/Full_backups for both Production and Non Production database instances with an RMAN retention policy depending on your requirement (You may need to consider the VM disk size as well when deciding the retention days. Otherwise it will consume a lot of disk space retain the backups.).

 

As per my opinion using Azure Backup as the only option for the DB backups will not be a safe solution. Always It will be better to use the Oracle recommended backup standards for DB backups. I believe it is more reliable to backup using RMAN inside the VM, to store on a disk, or use Azure Blob storage as a target for Oracle RMAN backup

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/oracle/oracle-backup-recovery 

Please see the below comments from MS Docs.

pQuote]
Back-up your Oracle Database using Oracle RMAN and optionally use Azure Blob Fuse to mount a highly redundant Azure Blob Storage account and write your RMAN backups to it for added resiliency.
bUnQuote]

 

 

2. MWS backups

I think VM snapshot/backup of the Application Server as mentioned by Yasas prior to applying a delivery is the most reliable option when it comes to the MWS backups. You can schedule automatic MWS backups as well depending on the requirement, simply via the Task Scheduler.
 

Best Reagrds,

Charith


Hi Charith,

Thank you for your suggestion.

We will consider Microsoft suggestion found in the suggested web page.

And of course, I will check RPO and RTO of customer requirements.

Best regards,

Kazu