Azure Backup is the Azure-based service you can use to back up or protect and restore your data in the Microsoft cloud. Azure Backup replaces your existing on-premises or off-site backup solution with a cloud-based solution that is reliable, secure and cost-competitive.
Azure Backup offers multiple components that you download and deploy on the appropriate computer, server or in the cloud.
The component or agent that you deploy depends on what you want to protect. All Azure Backup components can be used to back up data to a Recovery Services vault in Azure.
Azure Recovery Services Vault mainly protects.
- Azure Resource Manager-deployed VMs
- Classic VMs
- Standard Storage VMs
- VMs running on Managed Disks
- VMs encrypted using Azure Disk Encryption
- Application consistent backup of Windows VMs using VSS and Linux VMs using custom pre-snapshot and post-snapshot scripts
Now let us go ahead and perform a demonstration.
Create a Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter VM. I am not going to show how to create a VM here since I have shown that in many of my previous articles.
Next, click "Create a New Resource" and go to storage and select Backup and Site Recovery (OMS- Operations Management Suite).
Give some name to the vault, select a resource group and click "Create".
Inside your Recovery Services vault overview, click on Backup.
Select Azure in the workload and select Virtual Machine to backup. You can also choose on premises as your workload as well if you need to have a backup of your on-premises machines. Click on "Backup" to configure the backup.
By default, it is going to choose default policy of backup. You can create a new policy as well according to your need. We will go with the default policy here. Click on OK.
Select the Virtual Machine. You can have multiple Virtual Machines in the same backup vault. Click on OK.
Once the validation gets completed, click on "Enable Backup".
Now, you can see that it shows backup items as 1.
And if we click on that, we will be able to see that is backing up 1 item, an Azure Virtual Machine.
Depending on the number of virtual machines you want to protect, you can begin from different starting points.
If you want to back up multiple virtual machines in one operation, go to the Recovery Services vault and initiate the backup job from the vault dashboard.
If you want to back up a single virtual machine, initiate the backup job from VM operations menu.