Veeam Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure, It is not new but…

What if I told you, you could take any Veeam image based backup and convert / restore that to an Azure virtual machine without the requirement of any additional storage or file system within Azure other than the disks and resources required to run that virtual machine or virtual machines.

And what if I told you, this has been around for years with Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam have had this capability for a while now since 2016 in fact.

Primary use cases that we have seen have been,

Test and development

When you have the public cloud at your fingertips why not take advantage of it? Instead of having to purchase specific test and development environments. Also, perfect idea if you are looking to just see how certain apps and workloads are going to run in Microsoft Azure.

Data Migration

Let’s say you know where you are going and that is Microsoft Azure, how are you going to get those workloads there in a fast and efficient manner, Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure enables a fast way to restore those backups to the public cloud without compromising on keeping the restore points and more to the point the rollback is back to those production systems you also still have on premises.

Data recovery

We tend to talk about the bad failure scenarios, or we think nothing will happen to us and not really touch on the in between. What if you lost half your production virtualisation servers due to an outage of some description? What would you do? This feature within Veeam Backup & Replication enables you to restore some of your workloads from backups into Microsoft Azure you can then use an existing VPN or some other connectivity to join the environments and continue working or you could use VeeamPN to achieve this.

Walkthrough

In this YouTube video I walk through how easy and simple it is to get those image-based backups restored into Microsoft Azure as native Azure VMs for some of those use cases mentioned above. This also ties into the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure that was released this week.

Where should I run the conversion process?

I ran some tests for this one to determine for my lab where and what would be the best practice when it comes to restoring workloads into Microsoft Azure. Veeam offers a lot of choice when it comes to restore and how to assist when environmental challenges are in the way. Things like link speed to the public cloud due to location or other reasons for that. Also since the release of this feature back in 2016 there have also been many other enhancements and features added to Veeam Backup & Replication including the new Veeam Cloud Tier which gives us the ability to store our backups in Object storage, well we can also recover from those as well. This video linked below goes into more detail around where and what considerations you should take when looking to restore workloads to the public cloud.

Cloud Tier

It is only right that we have spoken about protecting native Azure VMs using the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure, we have spoken about getting your image based backups from either virtual or physical platforms that you have on premises or even in other public clouds to Microsoft Azure so I had to mention Cloud Tier or Capacity tier on how we can tier our backups or copy our backups into Microsoft Azure Blob Storage for either a long term retention or an offsite copy of your data.

Couple all these features together and we have a pretty dynamic and flexible way of being able to move data to from and within the public clouds.

If you have any questions or comments, feedback at all on the videos then please let me know either here in the comments, on the YouTube channel or on Twitter, a side note here is that I will be creating more video content over the next few weeks whilst we are stuck at home, I for one have been consuming a lot more of my news and education through YouTube and judging by the uptake in subscriptions I think you are too so let me know anything you want to see or for me to walk through.