Introducing Virtual Machine restore points – a simpler way to protect Azure workloads
Virtual Machine restore point are now generally available. Customers and Azure partners who are looking to build business continuity and disaster recovery solutions can use VM restore points to capture app consistent and crash consistent backups natively on the Azure platform. This can then be used to restore disks and VMs during scenarios such as data loss, data corruption or disaster recovery.
Azure Backup for AKS: Cloud native, Enterprise ready, Kubernetes aware backup
Kubernetes has emerged as the leading platform for deploying containerized applications, and many organizations are turning to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to enjoy a managed and efficient container orchestration experience. Thanks to the continuous innovations driven by the Kubernetes community, it has become easier to store state within Kubernetes clusters and even run mission-critical databases within these clusters. As more businesses adopt stateful AKS clusters, it is imperative for IT administrators to implement robust data protection measures to safeguard their applications against accidental deletion, malicious actors, and ransomware attacks. In response to this need, we are excited to announce the General Availability of Azure Backup for AKS, a simple, cloud-native solution that enables you to protect your AKS clusters via backing up Kubernetes workloads deployed along with the application data. How Azure Backup for AKS Works Customers running stateful AKS clusters previously relied on the native Azure Disk Backup service to protect their applications stored in Persistent Volumes. While this service offered a convenient way to back up data, restoring these snapshots to the cluster required substantial effort from the customers. Furthermore, customers were not only interested in protecting volumes but also sought an application-centric approach. They wanted to back up the entire application, including both the cluster state and volumes, in a Kubernetes-aware manner. With a "Linux first" mindset, we developed a solution leveraging Velero, an open-source software that provides backup and restore capabilities for Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes. Azure Backup complements this by offering orchestration and management features to our customers. This combination of open-source innovation and enterprise-grade data protection capabilities within an easy-to-use Azure-native experience significantly reduces the total cost of ownership and provides peace of mind to our customers. Getting started with Azure Backup for AKS is a breeze. You only need to install the Azure Backup extension in your cluster, and it's ready to be backed up. After installation, you can configure backups from the AKS Portal or enjoy the convenience of a single pane of glass view from the Backup Center to manage your AKS backups alongside other Azure workloads such as virtual machines and SQL Server. Key Features of Azure Backup for AKS With Azure Backup for AKS, you can configure scheduled backups for both your cluster state and application data, including persistent volumes. The cluster state is stored in a blob container, while the persistent volumes (based on Azure Disk) are backed up as snapshots in a Kubernetes-aware manner using the Container Storage Interface (CSI) Driver. This flexibility allows you to leverage backups for operational recovery or to recover from accidental data deletion at any time. One of the standout features of this solution is the fine-grained control it provides. You can choose to back up a specific namespace or an entire cluster, making it ideal for organizations with shared cluster architectures used by multiple application teams or departments. With granular namespace-level control, you can configure backups for each application based on your required Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) using backup policies. In terms of restores, the backups taken from your AKS cluster can be restored to the original cluster or to an alternate cluster, even in a different Azure subscription. This unlocks various scenarios where you can use backups to clone production environments for testing or migrate applications across clusters as part of a blue-green deployment strategy. For customers running database workloads as containers, such as MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB, Azure Backup for AKS provides the confidence to define specific customizations for these databases during backup, ensuring application consistency. With Azure Backup for AKS, customers can now confidently run stateful applications within their AKS clusters, benefiting from the advanced orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes managed by Azure while also having their data backed up using Azure Backup. As more organizations start operating mission-critical applications in a stateful manner on AKS, Azure Backup empowers IT administrators to have a peaceful night's sleep, knowing that their applications are well-protected. This solution represents another step forward in Azure's commitment to providing robust, integrated tools for the Azure Kubernetes Service, and it ensures that your data is safe, secure, and always within your reach. Learn more Check out this article to learn more about Azure Backup for AKS and start protecting your applications running on AKS today.Generally Available: Simplifying at scale BCDR management with Azure Business Continuity center
In the contemporary digital landscape, the establishment of robust business continuity strategies is imperative for organizations navigating the complexities of technology. Given the heavy reliance on digital infrastructure, fortifying these systems against potential disruptions is crucial. In response to this challenge, we are thrilled to introduce the General availability of Azure Business Continuity (ABC) Center, across all regions. Azure Backup center has now evolved into Azure Business Continuity Center, with advanced and powerful BCDR management capabilities. With the Azure Business Continuity Center, enterprises can seamlessly govern, monitor, operate, and analyze protection at-scale. This release includes support for the following key features: Insights into Protection Estate: Gain comprehensive insights into the protection estate across solutions such as Backup and Azure Site Recovery for both your Azure and Hybrid (VMware) resources. Explore more in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 1: Understand Protection Estate Summary - Microsoft Community Hub Identify and Protect Resources: Easily identify resources that are not currently protected and take proactive measures to secure them. Refer to Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 2: understand your protectable resources inventory - Microsoft Community Hub. Centralized Resource Protection: Ensure the protection of resources and execute actions from a single, centralized location. Detailed information is available in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 3: understand your protected items inventory - Microsoft Community Hub Optimize Security Configuration: Safeguard your resources against scenarios like ransomware threats, malicious attacks, and rogue admin activities. Learn how to optimize security configurations in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 4: optimize security configuration - Microsoft Community Hub Unified Monitoring: Attain quick visibility into failures in meeting business continuity SLAs through unified monitoring. Utilize various views, such as jobs, to monitor from a central location and configure alerts and notifications for timely awareness of any SLA violations regarding critical resources. Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 5: Monitoring protection - Microsoft Community Hub Ensuring Compliance: Leverage inbuilt Azure Policies to govern resources for business continuity and ensure compliance. Obtain a detailed compliance list of all assigned Azure Policies, including the number of resources within the scope of assignment that are compliant or non-compliant. ABCC seamlessly integrates with Azure Policy, empowering customers with robust compliance capabilities. Oversight of BCDR Artifacts - Efficiently create and oversee the lifecycle of artifacts such as vaults. Automate common and standard use cases, including the lifecycle management of schedules and policies established for both Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery. Obtain Insights - For analyzing historical trends and gaining deeper insights on your protection across Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery. Reports offer the following capabilities: Allocating and forecasting of cloud storage consumed. Auditing backups and restores. Identifying key trends at different levels of granularity. Gaining visibility and insights into cost optimization opportunities for your backups. Learn more about ABC Center to understand how it can revolutionize your business continuity journey for the resourcesPublic Preview: Azure Business Continuity Center is now available in all regions
In the contemporary digital landscape, the establishment of robust business continuity strategies is imperative for organizations navigating the complexities of technology. Given the heavy reliance on digital infrastructure, fortifying these systems against potential disruptions is crucial. In response to this challenge, we are thrilled to introduce the Public Preview of Azure Business Continuity (ABC) Center a groundbreaking initiative designed to enhance your business's resilience across all regions. With the Azure Business Continuity Center, enterprises can seamlessly govern, monitor, operate, and analyze protection at scale. This release includes support for the following key features: Insights into Protection Estate: Gain comprehensive insights into the protection estate across solutions such as Backup and Azure Site Recovery for both your Azure and Hybrid (VMware) resources. Explore more in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 1: Understand Protection Estate Summary - Microsoft Community Hub Identify and Protect Resources: Easily identify resources that are not currently protected and take proactive measures to secure them. Refer to Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 2: understand your protectable resources inventory - Microsoft Community Hub. Centralized Resource Protection: Ensure the protection of resources and execute actions from a single, centralized location. Detailed information is available in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 3: understand your protected items inventory - Microsoft Community Hub Optimize Security Configuration: Safeguard your resources against scenarios like ransomware threats, malicious attacks, and rogue admin activities. Learn how to optimize security configurations in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 4: optimize security configuration - Microsoft Community Hub Unified Monitoring: Attain quick visibility into failures in meeting business continuity SLAs through unified monitoring. Utilize various views, such as jobs, to monitor from a central location and configure alerts and notifications for timely awareness of any SLA violations regarding critical resources. Explore unified monitoring in Business Continuity with ABCC: Part 5: Monitoring protection - Microsoft Community Hub Ensuring Compliance: Leverage inbuilt Azure Policies to govern resources for business continuity and ensure compliance. Obtain a detailed compliance list view of all assigned Azure Policies, including the number of resources within the scope of assignment that are compliant or non-compliant. ABCC seamlessly integrates with Azure Policy, empowering customers with robust compliance capabilities. Learn more about ABC Center to understand how it can revolutionize your business continuity journey for the resourcesRevolutionize Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery with Azure Business Continuity Center
In the ever-evolving landscape of business, where innovation and resilience stand as pillars of success, business continuity is not merely a concern; it's the bedrock upon which organizations build their future. It involves meticulous planning and the fortification of resources through robust backup and disaster recovery measures, ensuring that enterprises can navigate disruptions without missing a beat. However, in the face of rapid technological advancements, this once straightforward journey has grown considerably intricate. To help customers on this journey, I’m excited to announce the Public Preview of Azure Business Continuity (ABC) Center. Below, we’ll describe how organizations can benefit from ABC center and take advantage of the new capabilities. Scenario Let's enter the world of Contoso, a forward-thinking organization. In their journey to adapt to the advent of digital transformations and the proliferation of hybrid work models, Contoso faces an unprecedented challenge—the growing menace of ransomware attacks. In today's digital age, the significance of backup and disaster recovery has never been more pronounced for Contoso, as for many other organizations. Contoso finds themselves at a crossroads where the demand to adapt isn't enough; they must excel in the face of adversity. One notable trend among businesses is the inclination to diversify their data protection strategies. Contoso, too, has embraced this trend by investing in multiple vendors to shield their data across a rapidly expanding array of platforms. However, the complexity of managing diverse environments, spanning on-premises infrastructure and cloud solutions, poses formidable challenges. It has given rise to fragmented experiences and data fragmentation, leading to a host of issues: Extended time spent navigating different dashboards to monitor business continuity, Complexity in governance and compliance, Increased overhead for large-scale protection configurations, Extended recovery times when grappling with fragmented experiences and many more Contoso meets Azure Business Continuity (ABC) Center To help navigate these formidable challenges, Contoso is introduced to the Azure Business Continuity Center. This powerful tool provides a comprehensive solution for Contoso’s business continuity and disaster recovery needs. With an intuitive and user-friendly web-based interface of the ABC Center, the management journey of Contoso’s backup and disaster recovery operations at scale has simplified meticulously. Contoso can use ABC Centers’ innovative platform to centralize the critical BCDR functions, with a single point of control across diverse environments and solutions. Contoso can now rest assured that their business continuity management is not only streamlined but optimized for peak performance with ABC Center. Let’s see how Contoso benefits from ABC Center: 1. Centralized Views and Operations: Contoso used multiple solutions for business continuity and so far, used separate interfaces to understand their protection estate and aggregated it manually. With ABC, Contoso can effortlessly view, monitor, govern, and audit compliance for protected items across various solutions and environments, including Azure and hybrid setups. Moreover, it equips Contoso admins with the ability to execute core actions from this unified interface. ABC has also simplified the process of finding, learning, and adopting the best fit BCDR solutions for Contoso. 2. Unified Monitoring: Contoso had built separate dashboards and used automation to monitor their protection with multiple solutions. But now no more. With ABC Center, now Contoso gets holistic visibility and actionable insights into their BCDR estate which significantly reduces the time required to detect issues and take remedial actions. Contoso now uses unified views like jobs, alerts, metrics along with guided alerting and notification experiences, integrated troubleshooting for backup and disaster recovery scenarios, and default critical security alerts, ensuring a proactive approach to security. 3. BCDR coverage for Security: In a world where security is paramount, Contoso had configured their environment to align with BCDR goals. But It's necessary for them to know if their configuration is in alignment with best practices for business continuity. So far, they have relied on consulting from MVPs and third-party partners. Now they are using the ABC Center proactive assessment capability for the configuration and able to quickly identify gaps in security settings. They can now evaluate the effectiveness of these settings to safeguard against threats like malware, ransomware, and intrusions, mitigating potential financial and data losses. 4. Governance and Audit Compliance: Contoso adheres to various compliance standards. It’s very important for them to audit and prove compliance against those standards to stay in business. Now they use ABC to maintain regulatory compliance and optimizing costs. They are now able to configure their environment, preventing misconfigurations, ensuring full protection, and evaluating drifts around BCDR objectives from ABC Centers compliance capabilities. This not only minimizes risk but also helps in achieving regulatory compliance. Contoso's management is delighted with the newfound sense of control and confidence. They can rely on the Azure Business Continuity Center to protect their data, applications, and services across hybrid environments, ensuring seamless business continuity. In the ever-changing landscape of business, where resilience is a key to success, Contoso is now well-prepared to navigate any challenges that come their way. Contoso's BCDR management has undergone a revolutionary shift, with being more streamlined, optimized for peak performance, making them a resilient and robust organization in the face of adversity. Learn more about ABC Center to understand how it can revolutionize your business continuity journey for the resources in all regions.Protect Azure workloads with VM level consistency using Agentless Crash-Consistent Restore Points!
Today we are happy to announce public preview support for multi disk crash consistency mode in Virtual Machine (VM) restore points. A crash consistent VM restore point is an agentless solution that stores the VM configuration and point-in-time write-order consistent snapshots for all managed disks attached to a VM. This is same as the status of data in the VM after a power outage or a crash. VM restore points, announced in July’22, enabled reliable restoration of disks and VMs for data loss, corruption, disaster recovery, and infrastructure maintenance incidents. Using VM restore points, Azure Backup and ISV partners such as Commvault and Veritas offer BCDR solutions for customers. VM restore points are incremental, where the first VM restore point stores a full copy of your data. For each successive restore point of the VM, an incremental copy i.e., only the changes to your disks are stored. The incremental design enables you to benefit from the data protection of frequent backups while minimizing storage costs. You can also use the built-in copy functionality to copy your VM restore points to any region of your choice to get protection from regional failures. Key Benefits of Crash Consistent Restore Points Agentless solution Using agents for VM restore points is considered as a security, compliance, and management overhead by some partners/customers. Crash consistent restore points directly takes the multi-disk consistent snapshots from the host machine thereby removing the overhead of an agent inside the VM. OS agnostic support As an agentless solution, there is no dependency on the guest operating system (OS). All Windows and Linux OS types are supported by crash consistent restore points. Erstwhile unsupported Linux OS versions, 32-bit OS systems, Windows VMs with ARM64 etc. with application consistency mode are now supported with crash consistency mode. High Frequency support Crash consistent restore points support 1 hour frequency enabling lower RPO for applications running on Azure VMs. VM Level Consistency Prior to VM restore points, customers/partners had to use managed disk snapshots which are taken at per disk level. Due to this consistency at VM level could not be guaranteed and it was also cumbersome to manage. Resiliency solutions with crash consistent VM restore points Azure Backup: Providing first class backup support using VM restore points Azure Virtual Machine Backup enables you to create an enhanced policy to take multiple snapshots a day. This allows you to protect your virtual machines with Recovery Point Objective (RPO) as low as 4 hours. Azure Backup now supports crash consistent restore points (in private preview). Please enroll here to use the capability. “Azure Backup will enable customers to protect a wider set of Virtual Machines (VM) running Linux distributions that are not on the current support matrix as well as VMs that do not use Azure extensions using crash consistent restore points.” - Aravindan Gopalakrishnan, PRINCIPAL PDM MANAGER – Microsoft, Azure Backup Zerto – An HPE Company: Delivering Consistency efficiently with crash-consistent VM restore points Zerto an enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery company, is one of the first ISV partners to integrate the new crash-consistent snapshot capability into their product. This integration will enable whole VM protection with crash-consistent snapshots across multiple volumes. “Multi-volume consistency protection is one of the most sought after features by Azure Customers”. - Shannon Snowden, Senior Product Manager - Zerto, an HPE Company “Multi-volume virtual machine (VM) level crash consistency is critical in disaster recovery protection. With the new Azure crash consistent snapshot capability, it enables Zerto to create VM level crash-consistent restore points using underlying snapshots.” - Sandra Biton, Engineering Group Manager – Zerto, an HPE company Zerto 10 introduces multidisk consistency for Azure VMs, which protects VMs to, from, and within Azure with complete disk consistency. Moving away from snapshot-based replication, multidisk consistency for Azure VMs now leverages a new restore point API, offering an easier and more efficient way to manage replication and recovery operations. Get Started Click here to enrol in public preview of crash consistent VM restore points, Learn more about VM restore points. Please share your feedback or questions in the comments section below.
