Easy backup and restore VM's when using Azure

Question

I have a couple of VMs that I want to backup and restore easily and often. Preferably as a group.

I have tried default Azure backup and restore but noticed that it doesn't seem to do much. It is easy to create and schedule backups but it is not clear to me how these backups can be used to bring a VM back to its original state.

The use cases for the default backup / restore seem to be very different from what I expected. I expected something somewhat similar to VirtualBox: take a snapshot and then restore takes the VM back to the snapshot.

Restore of VM in Azure does not seem to be a supported use case. I think the idea is more to clone / duplicate the machine.

The default "restore" is a feature to create another VM because it you try to restore Azure shows an error message

A virtual machine with the same already exists in the selected resource group. Please change the virtual machine name or select a new resource group.

There is an option to restore disks. This seems to work at first. Restore job completes successfully but nothing it restored. The file system is the same as before restore.

There is no detailed log so there is no way to determine what is happening. There is only exit status: success restore completed successfully.

Are there other ways to mimic VirtualBox functionality? Take snapshots and restore VM's using such snapshots?

Does MS have plans to enhance backup in such way that it also supports restore?

Answer 1

Snapshot works by capturing image state of a virtual machine. In Azure, you can snapshot your VHD and restore that snapshot whenever you'd like. Get started with snapshot here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/snapshot-copy-managed-disk

Disk snapshot works best in case your virtual machine uses one disk (for the OS). Or if that virtual machine has more than one disk, disk snapshot is still useful, but takes time and may result disk management overhead. In that case, you could go with image generalization to capturing the whole virtual machine's state at once using tool like sysprep (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/capture-image-resource)

From your screenshot, the problem is exactly what is highlighted in red. You cannot overwrite your virtual machine to the existing one in the same resource group. You must restore it somewhere else.

Azure Site Recovery and Backup is designed to work with large deployment of virtual machines, with some capabilities of automation and disaster recovery.