Microsoft has announced the preview of backup pre-checks for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). As the name suggests, the feature will check your VMs’ configuration for issues that can unfavourably affect backups, collect this information so you can view it directly from the Recovery Services Vault dashboard and provide guidance for corrective measures to ensure successful file-consistent or application-consistent backups, wherever applicable. All this without any infrastructure and at no additional cost.
Over the past couple of weeks, we have announced multiple enhancements for backup and recovery of both Windows and Linux Azure Virtual Machines that reinforce Azure Backup’s cloud-first approach of backing up critical enterprise data in Azure. Enterprise production environments in Azure are becoming increasingly dynamic and are characterized by frequent VM configuration changes (such as network or platform related updates) that can adversely impact backup. Today, we are taking a step to enable customers to monitor the impact of configuration changes and take steps to ensure the continuity of successful backup operations.
Backup Pre-Checks run as part of the scheduled backup operations for your Azure VMs and complete with one of the following states:
- Passed: This state indicates that your VMs configuration is conducive for successful backups and no corrective action needs to be taken.
- Warning: This state indicates one or more issues in VM’s configuration that might lead to backup failures and provides recommended steps to ensure successful backups. Not having the latest VM Agent installed, for example, can cause backups to fail intermittently and falls in this class of issues.
- Critical: This state indicates one or more critical issues in the VM’s configuration that will lead to backup failures and provides required steps to ensure successful backups. A network issue caused due to an update to the NSG rules of a VM, for example, will fail backups as it prevents the VM from communicating with the Azure Backup service and falls in this class of issues.
Learn more about preparing your VMs for successful backups
