As the move to the cloud continues at a record pace, understanding how to properly backup and recover Azure virtual machines is becoming a key skill, one that every IT professional should possess.
In this course, you will learn how to plan and deploy Azure Backup and how to manage backups on a day-to-day basis. You will learn how to create the Recovery Services Vault that stores backed-up data, how to create backup policies, and how to perform backup operations. You’ll also learn how to perform VM restores.
The topics covered in this Azure course map very closely to the learning objectives covered in the Microsoft Azure certification exams. By mastering the topics covered in this course, you will not only learn the skills necessary for day-to-day Azure Backup management, but also learn the skills necessary to become Azure certified.
Learning Objectives
- Learn how to configure and review backup reports
- Understand how to perform backup operations
- Create a Recovery Services Vault
- Be able to create and configure backup policies
- Know how to assign backup policies
- Execute and perform restore operations
Intended Audience
- IT Professionals interested in becoming Azure cloud architects
- IT Professionals preparing for Microsoft’s Azure certification exams
Prerequisites
- General knowledge of IT infrastructure
- General knowledge of the Azure environment
Begin the restore process by browsing to your Recovery Services vault. Clicking on the Recovery Services vault opens the dashboard. From the vault dashboard, click on the backup items tile and select Azure Virtual Machine. Doing so opens the backup items blade and displays the list of Azure VMs. Select the VM to be restored so that the dashboard opens to the monitoring area. This contains the restore points pane.
Select restore VM on the VM dashboard menu to open the select restore point blade. When the blade opens, the dialog box displays all restore points from the last 30 days. We'll choose a restore point here and click okay. At this point, the restore blade shows that the restore point is set so we can move onto restore configuration. We are offered two choices on the restore configuration blade. We are offered the option to create a virtual machine and we are offered the option to restore disks.
After setting our restore type to create a virtual machine, we need to provide a name for the VM we are creating. The name must be unique to the resource group and can't replace the VM if it already exists in the subscription. For this exercise, I'm going to name the new VM, MyVM. I can do this because in preparation for this demonstration, I went ahead and simulated a VM failure by deleting the current MyVM Virtual Machine. So with our original MyVM Virtual Machine deleted, we can go ahead and begin the restore process.
In this case, we will restore to our existing resource group and we'll create the new VM on our existing virtual network and on the default subnet. The staging location menu lists the storage accounts in the same location as the Recovery Services vault. We must also select a storage account as the staging area that is used during the restore. Storage accounts that are zone redundant are not supported for this process. Nor are storage accounts that don't reside in the same location as the Recovery Services vault.
If there are no storage accounts created within the same location as the Recovery Services vault, we must create one before we start the restore process. In our case, we already have a storage account created. A few things to note here. If the VM being restored uses managed disks, make sure that the storage account selected has never been enabled and is not enabled for Azure Storage Service Encryption. Additionally, all disks restored will be based on the storage type of the storage account selected.
This means that all disks restored will be either premium or standard disks. Microsoft does not support a mixed mode of disks when restoring. At this point, we can click okay on the restore configuration blade to finalize the restore configuration. The last step in the process is to click restore on the restore blade to trigger the restore operation. The restore process is launched and the new VM is created during the restore process.
Tom is a 25+ year veteran of the IT industry, having worked in environments as large as 40k seats and as small as 50 seats. Throughout the course of a long an interesting career, he has built an in-depth skillset that spans numerous IT disciplines. Tom has designed and architected small, large, and global IT solutions.
In addition to the Cloud Platform and Infrastructure MCSE certification, Tom also carries several other Microsoft certifications. His ability to see things from a strategic perspective allows Tom to architect solutions that closely align with business needs.
In his spare time, Tom enjoys camping, fishing, and playing poker.