Today we are excited to announce new features to Azure Backup’s support for Azure IaaS VM backup, which was previewed earlier this year. The new set of features include support for virtual machine backup with more data disks, long-term retention and more. These features strengthen Azure Backup’s ability to backup Azure IaaS virtual machines in a simple and reliable way.

New features in Azure Backup

Improved data disk limit on backup virtual machines

• Support for virtual machine backup with 16 data disks in addition to the OS disk.
• This improved support comes with a more predictable backup time.

Support for long-term retention

• Virtual machine backups can be retained for up to 99 years.
• Flexible and industry standard GFS schema provides powerful customization of retention choices for backup copies.

Example backup retention settings for retaining up to 99 years

Enhanced monitoring and reporting

• Downloadable summary report gives a snapshot of backup and restore operations on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
• Every backup job now includes the backup data size transferred value to track the storage consumption for a specific backup job.
• Export job functionality provides detailed information on jobs triggered in specified timeframes and can be customized to get job details per specified filters.

Addition of powerful choices

• Offline VM backup: Ability to configure protection on an offline VM.
• Cancel job: Ability to cancel an in-progress backup or restore job.
• Built-in backup policy: Every backup vault created will come with a built-in backup policy to save few clicks in setting up backup at scale.
• Ability to restore the virtual machine to storage account of choice.

Three simple steps to setup backup for Azure Virtual Machines

Setting up backup for Azure virtual machines can be achieved in three simple steps:

1. Discover the machines that can be protected in the Azure Backup vault.
2. Register the discovered virtual machines to Azure Backup vault.
3. Protect the registered virtual machines by associating them with a policy defining backup schedule and how long you want to retain.

In case you don’t have vault, start by creating an Azure Backup vault in the same region as the virtual machines you want to backup.

You can also watch this video by Corey Sanders on IaaS VM backup.

Related links and additional content:

• Learn more about Azure Backup.
• Looking for documentation? Check out the Azure IaaS VM backup documentation.
• Click for a free Azure trial subscription.
• Need help? Reach out to Azure Backup forum for support.
• Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup: contribute new ideas and up-vote existing ones.
• Follow us on Twitter and Channel9 for the latest news and updates.