Veeam V10 Direct Restore Multiple VMs Into Azure- Part 1 GUI

Restoring Multiple VMs to Azure:  Part 1

Use Cases: 

Migration:

The most obvious use would be for migration, moving your Veeam VM backup (AHV, VMware Hyper-V) or your Physical Server backups (Windows or Linux) off your aging infrastructure to a hyper-scaler like Azure.

When considering purchasing new hardware for your data centre the discussion on whether to go cloud is always an interesting one. Azure will provide you with a rental type infrastructure ensuring uptime on the underlying hardware. This is in its definition Infrastructure as A Service IaaS.

Dev Ops:

Customers that are not ready to move production into Azure IaaS can still consider using Azure as a Development platform, this makes a lot of financial sense. Rent Infrastructure for the limited time period that the company will be testing or developing on application workloads, only pay as you use. Why purchase or keep hardware around just to run development on copies of production for the development life cycle, rather rent the infrastructure for that period.

Disaster Recovery:

When Considering a Cold Disaster Recovery site, Azure is a great option. Veeam backups are made readily available on-premise or in a cold storage tier and can be used at any moment to create a VM instance based on its Point in Time data.

Prerequisites:

Azure is like any other infrastructure Veeam requires basics setup in order to create a VM and make it available to business.

• Sign up or have a Azure Subscription , Sign up with Azure Here
• Create a Resource Group (logical Grouping of Resources)
• Virtual Network (Inside Resource Group)
• Storage Account (Storage profile used for VMs Disks)

Create a Resource Group

1. Log in to the Microsoft Azure portal
2. Click Resource groups from the menu of services to access the Resource Groups
3. click Add to create a new resource group
4. Provide the required information for the new resource group
5. Click Create
   
   
   

Create a Virtual Network

1. From the Azure portal menu, select Create a resource 
2. From the Azure Marketplace, select Networking > Virtual network
3. In Create virtual network, enter or select correct information
4. Click Create.

Create a Storage Account

1. Log into your Azure Subscription
2. Click on the Storage Accounts link
3. Click the + Add button
4. Fill in the Required information
5. Click the Review + Create button
   
   

VBR Run Direct Restore Job:

Open You Veeam Backup & Replication console

Navigate to Home > Backups > Disk

In the main window you should see list of jobs containing backup objects > Expand Job grouping to see backup Objects

Select all Objects to be collectively restored to Azure & click Restore to Microsoft Azure Button.

In restore to Microsoft azure wizard, Specify Subscription, Data Center Location, Select Use Azure Proxy VM, Click Next.

Select & Edit each VM, edit to corresponding VM instance size available to your subscription, Specify storage account.

The complexity of restoring multiple VM in a single job was, needing different sizing per VM, the restore Job could contain multiple workloads of which one might need more resources than the Other.

Applications within workloads might need more Storage IOPs than others and for this the option to choose the correct storage account per Workload being restored into Azure.

Azure VM sizes are dependent on Region & subscription & can be found here

Here an example from Azure on Av2 Series 

Specify Resource Group Per Workload, Group edit or specify individually.
 

Select the required Virtual Network Per Workload as Group or individually.

You can segment networks, for example, restoring Public facing APPs and webservers into a DMZ 

network and the supporting infrastructure like database servers into an internal network.

Assigning Pubic IP will allow for External IP access to the restored Workload

Finalize the wizard steps and on Completion, Navigate to Home, “Last 24 Hours”, Running.

Conclusion:

This a simplistic method of moving your workloads contained in Veeam Backups to Azure Public cloud with ease.

Whether the use case is DevOps, Migration or using Azure public cloud as a Cold Disaster Recovery Site, the wizard driven menu with Veeam Backup & Replication GUI makes this easy for any IT professional.

Check out my Part 2 of this post runs this entire process through PowerShell

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