Today, we are excited to announce the ability to seamlessly backup virtual machines in Azure from the VM management blade using Azure Backup. Azure Backup already supports backup of classic and Resource Manager VMs (Windows or Linux) using Recovery Services vault, running on standard storage or on Premium Storage. We also announced backup of VMs encrypted using ADE (Azure Disk Encryption), a couple of weeks back. With this announcement, we are bringing the backup experience closer to VM management experience, giving ability to backup VMs directly from VM management blade. This announcement makes Azure the public cloud providing a backup experience natively integrated into VM management.

Azure Virtual Machines provide a great value proposition for different kind of workloads that want to harness the power of cloud. It provides a range of VMs offering basic capabilities to running powerful GPUs to meet customer demands. Backing VMs against accidental deletions and corruptions resulting from human errors is a critical capability for enterprise customers as well as small and medium scale customers who are deploying their production workloads in the cloud. This integration makes meeting that requirement seamless with a simple two-step backup configuration.

Value proposition

Azure Backup’s cloud-first approach to backup puts following cloud promises into action:

• Freedom from infrastructure: No need to deploy any infrastructure to backup VMs
• Cloud Economics: Customers can leverage highly available, scalable and resilient backup service at a cost-effective price
• Infinite scale: Customers can protect multiple VMs in one go or one at a time using a Recovery Services vault
• Pay as you go: Simple Backup pricing makes it easy to protect VMs and pay for what you use

Features

With the integration of Azure Backup into VM management blade, customers will be able to perform following operations directly from VM management blade:

• Configure Backup using simple two-step configuration.
• Trigger an on-demand backup for backup configured VMs
• Restore a complete VM, all disks or a file-folders inside the VM( In preview for Windows VMs) from backup data
• View recovery points corresponding to configured backup schedule

Get started

To get started,select a virtual machine from the Virtual machines list view. Select Backup in the Settings menu.

• Create or select a Recovery Services vault: A recovery Services vault stores backups separate from customer storage account to guard from accidental deletions.
• Create or Select a Backup Policy: A backup policy specifies the schedule at which backups will be running and how long to store backup data.

By default a vault and a policy is selected to make this experience even smoother. Customers have the flexibility to customize this as per needs.

Related links and additional content

• Learn more about Azure Backup 
• Want more details? Check out Azure Backup documentation
• Sign up for a free Azure trial subscription
• Need help? Reach out to Azure Backup forum for support
• Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup by contributing new ideas and voting up existing ones.
• Follow us on Twitter @AzureBackup for the latest news and updates