Virtual Machine Data Protection – Data Protection

Virtual Machine Data Protection – Data Protection

When it comes to data protection of virtual machines, you have multiple options available. The choice here depends on the use-case scenarios. Let’s cover a quick introduction to these options. Nevertheless, we will cover them in depth later.

Azure Backup  To back up Azure VMs or servers, you rely on Azure Backup. You can create application-consistent backups for both Windows and Linux computers; then store them in the Recovery Services vault. During the restore process, you can restore the entire VM or specific files.

Azure Site Recovery (ASR)  Azure Site Recovery is a disaster recovery solution that can be used to replicate your VMs to a secondary region and fire them up during a regional outage. You can fail over from the Azure portal, and the infrastructure will be created in a secondary region within a few minutes.

Snapshots  When it comes to development and testing, managed disk snapshots offer a reliable and simple option to back up your VMs. Snapshots are independent read-only copies of the managed disk and can be used to create new managed disks.

Images  You have already learned about images in Chapter 7, “Azure Virtual Machines.” Images will contain the OS disk and all the data disks that were part of the VM. Using this custom image, you can create hundreds of VMs. There are two types of images: generalized and specialized.

From an initial impression, specialized images and snapshots may look similar. In specialized images, you take an image of a live virtual machine retaining the hostname, user accounts, and other information. Taking a snapshot of the disk also preserves all the data and configuration. Well, the difference here is the snapshot applies to a single disk; if you have a VM with multiple disks, then you need to create separate snapshots for each of these disks. In the case of images, all disks are taken into consideration while creating the image. Second, the snapshot is not aware of any additional disks other than the one it contains. This creates an issue when you are working with disks that are in coordination, for example, RAID. As of now, the snapshot lacks this coordination with other disks. Images, on the other hand, take the live copy of the VM, so the disks are in coordination.

Apart from Azure Backup, there are more options you can use for backing up VMs.

• If you want to back up files and folders in Azure VM, then you can run the MARS agent and get this done without the need to back up the entire VM.
• Use System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) or Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS) running in Azure. Then you can back up the DPM/MABS server to a Recovery Services vault using Azure Backup.
• Use third-party backup solutions like Commvault, Veeam, etc., available in Azure Marketplace.

Since we talked about MARS earlier, we will skip that. Nonetheless, we will cover MABS in depth later in this chapter. Let’s start with virtual machine snapshots.