Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus promises Cloud PC comebacks in 30 minutes Microsoft has launched Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus, a service designed to rapidly bring Cloud PCs back online in the event of an outage. The preview is currently available as a licensed add-on for Windows 365 Enterprise, and goes GA in the spring. It's pitched at users in desperate need of higher disaster recovery …
"What in the crazy world of Arthur brown does that even mean?"
It was called Azure Stack HCI until recently, and it's basically on-prem hyperconverged clusters which are managed through the Azure portal.
There was mention a few months ago of a virtual appliance becoming available which had the management functionality of Azure but could be hosted locally for systems which needed to be able to run disconnected from the internet. I haven't checked whether that is actually available yet.
It allows Microsoft to rake in some lovely subscription payments without even having to provide the hardware to run the VMs!
Yes, but...
Two questions:-
If the applications that you need to run need to "phone home" when you're disconnected from t'internet, then you've got your data, but you can't open or edit it. Or are applications going to be told not to phone home during an outage? If so, how does MS know there is an outage, rather than you craftily pulling the LAN cable out in order to have unfettered use of their apps?
Is the data that is hosted on your system actually accessible as such, or is it encoded in some kind of Azure gloop? If encoded, then you might as well go with storing your data locally. Eh, I believe that's called On Prem.
The Azure Stack HCI / Azure Local hypervisor is basically Hyper-V.
As regards what's on it, if it's subscription then it's going to want to phone home at least every 30 days. Purcahsed licenses (e.g. Office LTSC) should continue to work.
Lovely : the disasters that you're paying Microsoft extra money to recover from quickly are disasters caused entirely by Microsoft. It's like hiring someone who regularly beats you up, then paying them extra to take you to hospital quickly after a beating.
Takes more than 30 minutes to restore windows from a flash drive in my experience. Sounds like they turn your computer into a browser so you can use 365 on the web and access your documents on-line using onedrive. They will move your documents from your local machine to onedrive leaving links pointing to the cloud. if you don't have access to the cloud you don't have access to your document. that's not a backup, that's and archive.
And how much per month is this "guarantee" and hosting service costing people?
They could probably buy a spare computer along with a primary to host it locally with a cross-system drive mirroring setup like banks use so they'd have instant failover like a bank, never mind this pathetic 30 minute bullshit.
Downtime is money. Especially if your business is profitable enough to make AWS Hosting affordable!
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