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Manual Failover of Azure Storage Account

  • October 8, 2020
  • 4 min read
Cloud and Virtualization Architect. Florent is specializing in public, hybrid, and private cloud technologies. He is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management and an MCSE in Private Cloud.
Cloud and Virtualization Architect. Florent is specializing in public, hybrid, and private cloud technologies. He is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management and an MCSE in Private Cloud.

Azure

If you are currently running a storage account, in GRS, you can now do a failover, manually, to switch from the primary region to the secondary. From the 17th of June, this feature is now generally available: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-storage-account-failover-ga/

To start, be sure to have a storage account, with one of the following SKU:

  • Geo-redundant storage (GRS) or read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
  • Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) or read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS)

To verify this information, go into your storage account, and you will have the information directly here, or in the Geo-Replication part:

Geo-Replication part - img

We can see available regions on the Overview panel:

Overview panel

To do the failover, it’s very simple, you have 3 possibilities:

  • Through PowerShell:

  • Through Azure CLI:

Through the portal, in your storage account, click on Geo-Replication and on Prepare for failover:

Prepare for failover

Here, we have some information regarding the failover. Write yes to start it:

Write yes to start

Failover is in progress:

Failover is in progress

When the failover is finished after few minutes, the principal region is now North Europe:

Geo-replication refresh

We can see that the DNS name to access this storage account is the same, but the IP changed:

DNS name

The storage account moved to LRS also. You can put it back to GRS, that we will re-replicate datas in West Europe:

LRS configuration

When it’s done, you have your 2 regions:

Your regions

Cloudjourney

If you want to go back to West Europe in Primary, do the failover again.

Found Florent’s article helpful? Looking for a reliable, high-performance, and cost-effective shared storage solution for your production cluster?
Dmytro Malynka
Dmytro Malynka StarWind Virtual SAN Product Manager
We’ve got you covered! StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is specifically designed to provide highly-available shared storage for Hyper-V, vSphere, and KVM clusters. With StarWind VSAN, simplicity is key: utilize the local disks of your hypervisor hosts and create shared HA storage for your VMs. Interested in learning more? Book a short StarWind VSAN demo now and see it in action!