We have configured RAGRS storage with Azure between North Europe (Primary) and West Europe (Secondary). Is the fail over of the storage to the secondary location automatic and handled by Microsoft? How do we go about accessing the secondary location in the event of a DR scenario? I've seen a couple of articles stating that you need to add the prefix of "-secondary" but I'm not sure where and how we would authenticate? Can we access the VHDS files in the second location?
Many Thanks, David
As I answered here, you may read from your secondary by appending -secondary to the storage account name, in the connection string. You would still use the same primary (or secondary) access key.
Using the secondary connection string, you may access any blob in storage, but remember that it's eventually-consistent.
As far as Azure itself failing over to a secondary: That's part of Azure's DR, and the rules governing such a failover aren't publicly documented as far as I can tell.
To answer your questions:
Is the fail over of the storage to the secondary location automatic and handled by Microsoft?
Yes, it is handled by Microsoft. However please keep in mind that because your storage account's redundancy level is set as RAGRS instead of GRS, at any point of time you can read from the secondary location. Simply change your storage account connection string from yourstorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net to yourstorageaccount-secondary.blob.core.windows.net.
Can we access the VHDS files in the second location?
Yes, you can access VHD files but you can only read from them. Remember RA in RAGRS stands for Read Access. If you try to mount these VHDs or try to write to them, the operation would fail.
