First published on CloudBlogs on Sep 18, 2015
I’m excited to announce general availability of IaaS VM backup in Azure using Azure Backup service. With this GA, users can now provide reliable and secure enterprise-level data protection for Azure IaaS virtual machines. This announcement adds an exciting set of new features to the preview of IaaS VM backup released back in March. We saw a great response to the preview, and customers put the functionality through an incredibly wide variety of scenarios. As a result, we were able to gather a huge amount of feedback that was incorporated back into what is now a high-quality GA. Azure backup guarantees backups that are app consistent for Windows and File-system consistent for Linux – all without the need to shut down the VM using a policy-driven backup management experience.
Figure1
: Azure backup support for backup of IaaS virtual machines
Backup management operations can be scripted using
PowerShell cmdlets
released for IaaS VM backup. All operations, carried out either through Azure management portal or PowerShell can be audited using the operation logs through management services extension.
Figure2: Operation logs for backup operations in management services extension
Configuring backup can be at done at scale and is made simple by an in-built default policy which comes with backup vault creation. We spent a significant amount of time and energy improving the agentless backup management experience and this makes registering the VM’s to the backup vault seamless.
Azure backup has also enhanced the supported retention range from 30 days in preview to
99 years
. These retention ranges follow industry standard
GFS based retention policies
allowing the flexibility to choose the specific recovery points you want to retain for the long-term.
Figure3: Long-term retention policy to retain backups for 10 years
VM’s can be restored to a
choice of storage account
using the simple restore process. PowerShell provides the flexibility of simply restoring backup disks to a storage account, and a VM with custom configuration can be created from backup disks using the familiar VM creation cmdlets.
All of the backup management operations are accessible in the “Jobs” tab, and backup jobs provide additional information about data transferred during the backup operation. Custom notifications can be created on top of these jobs to e-mail administrators and co-administrators about job status changes using PowerShell cmdlets defined on these events.
Summary reports
are also generated for backup and restore operations and storage consumed in Azure on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, and these can be downloaded to Excel. Detailed job information can be accessed using the “Export Jobs” functionality.
Simply put: Azure backup provides the
native backup capability for Azure IaaS VM’s
using a reliable, enterprise grade service. Azure backup is present in all the public regions of Azure.
Setting up Azure backup requires just 3 extremely easy steps:
I’m excited to announce general availability of IaaS VM backup in Azure using Azure Backup service. With this GA, users can now provide reliable and secure enterprise-level data protection for Azure IaaS virtual machines. This announcement adds an exciting set of new features to the preview of IaaS VM backup released back in March. We saw a great response to the preview, and customers put the functionality through an incredibly wide variety of scenarios. As a result, we were able to gather a huge amount of feedback that was incorporated back into what is now a high-quality GA. Azure backup guarantees backups that are app consistent for Windows and File-system consistent for Linux – all without the need to shut down the VM using a policy-driven backup management experience.
- Discover the VM’s you want backup.
- Register the discovered VM’s to backup vault.
- Configure protection on the registered VM’s.
Published Sep 08, 2018
Version 1.0Brad Anderson
Iron Contributor
Joined September 06, 2018
Microsoft Security Blog
Follow this blog board to get notified when there's new activity