Tag: Backup

Azure Now Supports Backup Of Running Azure VMs

I recently blogged on Petri.com how you can configure backup of Azure virtual machines. This is a superb addition to Azure, making it ready, in my opinion, for production VM hosting.

The Way it Was

Previous to the addition to this feature, there was no way to backup a running Azure virtual machine in Azure as a complete VM. There were some bad hacks:

  • Storage snapshots: You could shut down a VM and snapshot the the storage account. This sucked. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t supported.
  • In-VM backup: You could deploy an agent into a VM and backup files and folders. This sucked too. Microsoft tried to push DPM sales with this, requiring one Datacenter SML for every 8 VMs.

What we needed was what we could do on-premises with Hyper-V or vSphere; we needed a per-VM mechanism for backing up an entire VM, with the ability to quickly restore that VM compete with OS, applications, and data.

And that’s what Azure Backup for VMs gives us.

The Way it is Now

Now we can:

  • Discover VMs
  • Register VMs
  • Protect VMs with policy, with up to 1 backup per day and up to 4 weeks retention.

The backup of Azure VMs is managed from the Azure portal. You get logs as well. There is no need to install or manage anything in the guest OS. A backup extension is automatically added to the VM when you protect it.

The entire VM is backed up and can be restored. Note that in terms of pricing:

  • Each VM is an instance
  • The size of the instance is the size of the virtual disk, not the size of the contents. So a 127 GB VM with 50 GB of contents is 127 GB, falling into the 50-500 GB instance bracket. This is different to Hyper-V, where it is the physical size that is counted (including checkpoints).

If you want granular backup then you can also deploy the Azure Backup agent into the guest OS. Note that this requires another instance and you will only be able to backup files and folders with this additional backup, which is managed from the MARS agent in the guest OS.

Note: I have talked to one of the Azure Backup PMs and he told me that there is no support for VM Generation ID. That means that you should not, ever, in any scenario, restore a virtual domain controller if there is more than one DC (the one you want to restore) in that forest.

My VM

I decided, after experimenting with Azure websites, that I wanted to retain 100% control over my website hosting. My site (WordPress) is hosted in an A2 VM and I run MySQL in the VM. This gives me the flexibility to add more sites to the VM and re-use MySQL. I don’t have any of the limitations that the ClearDB MySQL hosting has in Azure.

I configured a daily backup to run and to retain 4 weeks of data. The first backup ran last night with no issues:

I also have installed the Azure Backup agent into the guest OS. There I run a script to export MySQL to a file, and I backup this file and the IIS website folder. So in the event of a screw-up, I have the ability to restore:

  • Individual website files
  • The MySQL databases
  • The entire VM
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Microsoft Blogs About New Azure Backup Pricing

It’s April Fool’s Day, and the new pricing system for Azure Backup comes into force today. Make of that what you want 😀

I am not a fan of the new pricing system. I am all for costs coming down, but I can say from 8 months of selling Azure, complex pricing BLOCKS sales efforts by Microsoft partners. The new system isn’t just “price per GB” but it also includes the abstract notion of an “instance”.  A new blog post by Microsoft attempts to explain clearly what an instance is.

I’ve read it. I think I understand it. I know that no MSFT partner sales person will read it, our customers will call me, and when I explain it to them, I know that a sale will not happen. I’ve seen that trend with Azure too often (all but a handful of occasions) to know it’s not a once-off.

Anyway … enjoy the post by Microsoft.

Microsoft News – 27 March 2015

Welcome to the Azure Times! Or so it seems. Lots of Azure developments since I posted one of these news aggregations.

Windows Client

Azure

Office

Office 365

Giving Feedback to Azure WORKS

I’ve voted on a number of feedback items in Azure, mainly in backup, and I’m delighted to see that feedback having an impact.

I was presenting last months on Azure to partners in Northern Ireland when I was able to talk about an email I had received that morning that announced new features (seeding backup by disk, increased retention, and complex retention policies) that had been based on feedback.

Today, I got an email to confirm that another voted item, the ability to backup running VMs in Azure using Azure Backup, had been announced – I’m actually playing with it right now.

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Feedback via this forum works. It is public and measured, and it’s much more effective than complaining to your local Microsoft reps (some of whom are less effective than others). So give Microsoft the feedback! Don’t just say “I want X”. Instead, say “I want X because it will allow Y and Z”; a full scenario description is what the program managers need to understand the request.

My tip: partners working with Open licensing need a centralized admin portal.

The Price Of Azure Online Backup is … I Don’t Know!

Microsoft sent out emails last night to inform Azure customers that the pricing of Azure Online Backup is changing.

Currently, you get 5 GB free and then pay €0.149/month (rounded to €0.15) in North Europe for each additional 1 GB.

On April 1st, the pricing structure changes:

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So, 5 GB free. Then for each machine you backup, you pay at least €7.447, with an additional charge of €7.447 for each additional 500 GB protected on that machine. And that DOES NOT COVER the cost of storage consumed in Azure. You have to pay for that too (GB/month and transactions).

So how much will that be? I have no frickin’ idea. There is no indication what kind of storage or what resiliency is required.

It might be Block Blobs running at €0.0179/GB (LRS) or €0.0358/GB (GRS). But who knows because Microsoft didn’t bother documenting it!

That leads me to an issue. The biggest blocker I’ve seen in the adoption of Azure in the SME space is not cost, technical complexity, or trust. The biggest issue is that few people understand how to price a solution in Azure. If you’re deploying a VM you need the VM/hour cost, storage space, storage transactions, egress data, and probably a gateway. Is there a single place that says all that on the Azure portal? No. What Microsoft has is isolated islands of incomplete information on the Azure website, and a blizzard of pricing in their Excel-based pricing “tools”.

If Microsoft is serious about Azure adoption, then they need to get real about helping customers understand how to price tools. Azure Online Backup was the tool I was starting to get traction with in the SME/partner space. I can see this new announcement introducing uncertainty. This change needs to be changed … fast … and not go through the Sinofskian feedback model.

Grade: F. Must try harder.

Video: Microsoft Azure For Small-Medium Businesses

Earlier today I produced a video for my employers to discuss the role of Microsoft Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in the SME/SMB market. In the video I talk a little about what Azure is, the economic sense of a service like Azure for these businesses, how the Open licensing scheme works, and then I talk about 3 of the core services and some of the scenarios that apply.

Microsoft News – 19 February 2015

Here’s the latest in the Microsoft world. Shame on Lenovo for pre-installing adware that is a man-in-the-middle attack. Crapware must die!

Hyper-V

System Center

Azure

Office 365

Microsoft Partners

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 6 January 2015

A few little nuggets to get you back in the swing of things. And yes, I have completely ignored the US-only version 1.2 Azure Pricing Tool that suffers from “The Curse of Zune”.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

System Center

Windows Client

Azure

Windows Server Technical Preview – Differential Export

A differential export is an export of the differences of a virtual machine from between two points in time. It is used to enable an incremental backup of a virtual machine that is backed up using the new file-based backup system with Resilient Change Tracking. The below image shows the state of a VM and its backup after a full backup. Note that this file-based backup has used Resilient Change Tracking to identify what changes are being made to the VM’s storage since the backup.

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An incremental backup starts, using the differential export process. A backup checkpoint, including VM configuration and VHD fork (via AVHD) is created. The existing Resilient Change Tracking ID T1 is used to determine what has changed in the parent VHD to create a differential export of the VM in the backup target media (exported VM configuration T2 and the differential VHD).

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The backup checkpoint is removed and a new RCT ID (T2) is created so we can now do Resilient Change Tracking of the VHD for the time after the backup.

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Old reference points (RCT IDs) can be disposed of as required.

A “synthetic full backup” process is also support for third-party backup solutions.

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Hyper-V PM Taylor Brown talks about Change Tracking in his session at TechEd Europe 2014.

Microsoft News – 19 December 2014

We’re getting close to Christmas and Microsoft is starting to wind down for the year. Here’s a mostly-Azure report for the last few days.

Hyper-V

Azure

Miscellaneous