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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.

Hey! Found Florent’s insights useful? Looking for a cost-effective, high-performance, and easy-to-use hyperconverged platform?
Taras Shved
Taras Shved StarWind HCI Appliance Product Manager
Look no further! StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA) is a plug-and-play solution that combines compute, storage, networking, and virtualization software into a single easy-to-use hyperconverged platform. It's designed to significantly trim your IT costs and save valuable time. Interested in learning more? Book your StarWind HCA demo now to see it in action!