Microsoft - AZ-801: Configuring Windows Server Hybrid Advanced Services

Sample Questions

Explanation:

The Azure Diagnostics extension is an agent in Azure Monitor that collects monitoring data from the guest operating system and workloads of Azure virtual machines and other compute resources.

When you configure the Azure Diagnostics extension for Windows, you must specify a storage account where all specified data will be sent. You can optionally add one or more data sinks to send the data to different locations:

• Azure Monitor sink: Send guest performance data to Azure Monitor Metrics.
• Azure Event Hub sink: Send guest performance and log data to event hubs to forward outside of Azure. This sink can't be configured in the Azure portal.

PowerShell can be used to deploy the Azure Diagnostics extension to an existing virtual machine by using Set-AzVMDiagnosticsExtension, as in the following example:

Set-AzVMDiagnosticsExtension -ResourceGroupName "myvmresourcegroup" `
-VMName "myvm" `
-DiagnosticsConfigurationPath "DiagnosticsConfiguration.json"

The private settings are defined in the PrivateConfig element. The public settings are defined in the Public element of the configuration schema. You can also choose to specify the details of the storage account as parameters of the Set-AzVMDiagnosticsExtension cmdlet rather than including them in the private settings.

Reference: Install and configure the Azure Diagnostics extension for Windows (WAD)

Explanation:

Azure Storage encryption automatically encrypts your data stored on Azure managed disks (OS and data disks) at rest by default when persisting it to the cloud. 

Data in Azure managed disks is encrypted transparently using 256-bit AES encryption, one of the strongest block ciphers available, and is FIPS 140-2 compliant.

Azure Storage encryption does not impact the performance of managed disks and there is no additional cost.

Note: Temporary disks are not managed disks and are not encrypted by SSE, unless you enable encryption at host.

Reference: Server-side encryption of Azure Disk Storage

Explanation:

Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) is a general-purpose clustered file system (referred to as CSVFS) that enables cluster nodes to simultaneously read from and write to the same set of NT File System (NTFS) or Resilient File System (ReFS) volumes. CSV consolidates volumes hosted on disks connected to cluster nodes into a single namespace that's accessible in the uniform manner on each cluster node. Allowing concurrent volume access provides more balanced load distribution and considerably increases failover speed by eliminating the need for drive ownership changes or dismounting and remounting volumes.

Additionally, CSV offers the following capabilities:

• Support for the online chkdsk. The chkdsk operation runs online, without affecting workloads with open handles on the file system.
• Support for BitLocker Drive Encryption. You can use BitLocker to encrypt volumes for both traditional clustered disks and CSV-based volumes.
• Integration with SMB Multichannel and SMB Direct. This enables CSV traffic to stream across multiple networks in the cluster and to take advantage of network adapters that support Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA).
• Integration with Storage Spaces. This allows you to use virtualized storage on clusters with commodity hardware.
• The ability to scan and repair volumes online. CSV allows you to scan and repair volumes with no downtime when using tools such as chkdsk, fsutil, and the Repair-Volume Windows PowerShell cmdlet.
• Enhanced CSV Resiliency. Windows Server implements multiple instances of the Server service, which improves the resiliency and scalability of inter-node SMB traffic. The default instance of the Server service accepts requests that access regular file shares, while the additional instances manage inter-node CSV traffic.

CSV supports two main types of workloads:

• Clustered Microsoft Hyper-V VMs (including their virtual hard disk (VHD) files).
• Scale-out file shares hosting application data for the Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) clustered role. Such data includes Hyper-V VM files and Microsoft SQL Server database files.

CSV allows you to store disk files of multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single volume and run the VMs anywhere on any cluster node, or even on a different cluster. Additionally, CSV accelerates the Live Migration functionality. Eliminating the need to change the disk ownership when a VM moves to another node improves the performance and stability of the migration process.

Reference: Determine the functionality of Cluster Shared Volumes

Explanation:

Hyper-V failover clusters are used to make virtual machines (VMs) highly available, but they're typically limited to a single location. Multi-site clusters usually depend on specialized hardware and can be complicated and expensive to implement. If a natural disaster such as an earthquake or a flood occurred, all server infrastructure at the affected location could be lost.

One possible solution is to periodically copy the VM manually. You also can back up the VM and its storage. Although this solution achieves the desired result, it's resource intensive and time-consuming. In addition, because you perform backups only periodically, the backup is seldom as current as the running VM.

You can use Hyper-V Replica to implement an affordable BCDR solution for a virtual environment:

• Hyper-V Replica can protect against data loss from site outage by copying a live VM as a replica VM from one location to another. If the site that contains the primary VM becomes unavailable, the replica VM is available to keep workloads available.

• If necessary, you can use Hyper-V Replica to extend replication of the offline copy to a third location.

• If your organization only has a single location available, you can still use Hyper-V Replica to replicate VMs to a partner organization in another location, to a hosting provider, or to Microsoft Azure.

Hyper-V Replica can have the following two instances of a single VM residing on different Hyper-V hosts:

• The main, actively running VM, which is called a primary VM.
• An offline copy of the primary VM, which is called a replica VM.

If failure occurs at the primary server site, you can use Hyper-V Replica to perform a failover of the VM(s) to the replica server at a secondary server site. This will incur minimal downtime.

Hyper-V Replica has the components detailed in the following table.

Reference: Define Hyper-V Replica

Explanation:

The schtaks.exe command line utility enables an administrator to create, delete, query, change, run, and end scheduled tasks on a local or remote computer. Running Schtasks.exe without arguments displays the status and next run time for each registered task.

Reference: Schtasks.exe