How to restore to Azure with Veeam 9.5

Background.

One of the features that have been available in Veeam for a little while is the ability to recover from any backup taken with Veeam, be that VMware, Hyper-V, Veeam Agent for Windows or Veeam Agent for Linux. Veeam takes care of any conversion process that needs to take place to get the virtual machine running in Azure.

This can be leveraged as either a disaster recovery solution or indeed as a lift and shift solution to move on-premises workloads into Microsoft Azure.

The how to.

Let’s jump straight into this. I have created a free tier account in Azure to demonstrate how to recover a virtual machine to Azure, if you do not have an Azure account already, you can head on over to here to create your own free account. I will take a look at configuring Veeam and Azure to allow this process to happen.

First things first, launch the Azure configuration wizard in Veeam.

Note the mention of Veeam PN. I will cover this off in another blog post.

Select the Azure Resource Manager option.

My first issue, I do not have Azure Powershell installed. this is a pre-requisite. You can click the link in the prompt as shown below to initiate installation.

Step through the installation wizard until complete.

Click on configure account.

Enter the credentials you use to access your Azure account.

You can then see the subscriptions available to your account.

Now that the subscription has been added, launch the recover to Azure wizard. This is one of the options available when recovering from a backup in Veeam.

Select Azure Resource Manager again.

Select subscription and the location you would like to recover to. I am based in the UK, so chose an appropriate location for my workload. You can also select a Veeam proxy server running in Azure to aid recovery speed, but this is not essential.

Next snag, I have not provisioned any storage to my Azure account.

Log into Azure and select storage account from the dashboard.

Create a storage account and choose what level of replication you would like available. More info on Azure storage replication types can be found here.

Now the storage is available in the recovery wizard. Also, choose an appropriate VM size for the workload. I was being very ambitious with a Basic_A0 for a Windows Server 2016 workload….

Veeam will automatically create a resource group for the recovered VM.

The next snag I ran into was there were no networks provisioned in Azure to attach the recovered VM to. Start the create virtual network wizard as below.

Configure the network as required.

Choose the newly created network in the Veeam recovery wizard.

All good.

Enter the reason for restore.

Complete the wizard.

Once the recovery process has finished, we can see we now have a new virtual machine in Azure. This has been recovered from a VMware environment.

Here is an example of the restore process monitor with Veeam. I am sure with better comms, the restore process would have been quicker.

And here is all the resources created as part of the recovery process.

And there you have it!

Conclusion.

The whole process is fairly painless. This is a great tool if you want to migrate to Azure. Classing it as disaster recovery solution would be pushing it, due to the amount of time it would take to recover from an on-premises backup into Azure. Azure virtual machines can be accessed via an RDP session on the public IP address assigned to the recovered virtual machine.

I will follow up with an introduction to Veeam PN (Veeam Powered Network) VPN solution to make it easier to access those resources that are now running in the public cloud. If you are already running something like Azure Express Route into Azure, then you are all set.