Step-by-Step: Protect Azure VMs with Azure Backup
Hello Folks,
I’ve covered this topic before from many different angles. Step-by-Step: Setup the Online Backup Service for Windows Server 2012
- Step-By-Step: Backup your PC data to Azure
- Step-By-Step: Backup your PC data to Azure – Follow Up!
- Step-By-Step: Restoring your PC data from Azure
- Azure Backup – New Functionality
Today we’ll look at protecting your data on your Azure virtual machines from loss. if you’re looking for more info on the subject see Hybrid Cloud Workloads: Storage and Backup
Using Azure Backup to backup data from your Azure virtual machines provides a number of business benefits:
- Azure Backup automates backup and recovery for your virtual machines
- It takes application consistent backups to ensure that recovered data starts from a consistent state.
- There's no downtime involved during virtual machine backup.
- You can back up Azure virtual machines that are running Windows or Linux
- Recovery points are available for easy restore in the Azure Backup vault.
in our test we have 2 Windows VM and one Ubuntu VM running. First we’ll create a Backup[ vault, then we will let the recovery services discover the VMs in our environment. Following that we will register those VM and lastly we’ll setup the backup schedule.
Create a vault
1- In the Azure Management Portal, Click Recovery Services, New, Data Services, Recovery Services, Backup Vault and Quick Create. In Name, enter a name to identify your vault and in the Region filed select the geographic region for the vault. Click Create Vault.
Note: The Backup vault needs to be in the same region as the virtual machines you want to protect. If you have virtual machines in different regions create a vault in each one.
Register virtual machines
1- Now that we have our Vault we need to discover the VMs it can backup. In the main Recovery Services page double-click the vault to open it. Click the Registered Items and in the Action Bar click Discover
2- Once the discovery process completes, Click Register
3- In the Register Items dialogue box, Select the virtual machines you want to register and click the check mark to register them. The registration process deploys the Recovery Services extension on the virtual machine and enables backup. This extension enables Backup to take an application-consistent backup with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), without needing to shut down the virtual machine. After registration finishes the virtual machine will appear on the page with a Registered status.
Protect the virtual machine
1- On Registered Items tab select the virtual machine and click Protect in the action bar at the bottom to open the Protect Items wizard.
2- On the Select items to protect page check the virtual machines for which you want to enable protection. and click Next (the right pointing arrow)
3- On the Configure protection page you'll select a protection policy to apply to the virtual machines. This will define the backup schedule and how long the backup is retained in Azure Backup. If you define a new policy specify a name, how often the virtual machine should be backed up and how long the backed up virtual machine data should be retained in Azure Backup. You can retain a virtual machine for up to 30 days.
4- After protection is configured the virtual machine will appear on the Protected Items tab. It will appear with the Protected (initial backup pending) status until the initial backup finishes and then with a Protected status.
5- I selected each machine and clicked the Backup Now button to initiate the first backup. the running backups can be monitored in the Jobs tab.
I hope this was of value. and remember there is always more to learn.
Cheers!
