VBAZ: Configure a backup policy

Open the Azure appliance web console

In the VBR management console, go to Backup Infrastructure > Managed servers > Microsoft Azure

Click on the appliance > Open Console

This will open your default browser.

You will get a certificate warning. This is normal, because during the deployment process a default certificate is assigned to the appliance which does not correspond to the provisioned host name.

Just click Advanced and then on the "Proceed to ..." link.

 

 

You don't need to log in, because previously, during the appliance creation, the admin password of the appliance was also specified and saved by VBR. This is now used for the login.

Add the backup policy

Info: Policies are essentially the backup jobs themselves.

Choose Policies > + Add

A new wizard will open.

On the Policy info tab, give a name to the policy.

On the Sources tab:

Under Source, specify the service account. This is the account that you have already added at the start of the appliance deployment process.

Under Region, choose the region where your resources reside.

Under Resources, select the VMs that you'd like to protect by browsing the list of VMs.

Choose the VMs that you want to protect by this policy.

When all fields are filled, you can click Next.

On the Guest Processing tab, you can enable application-aware processing.

On the Target tab, enable backups.

Info: If you don't enable backups, the policy can be used to create snapshots of the virtual machines. Snapshots are cloud-native images created by Azure. Backups make use of snapshots to create backups which can be used to restore VMs directly from these backups. Snapshots cannot be directly used for restores.

On the scheduling tab:

You have the possibility to create 4 different types of schedules: daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. The target repository needs to be chosen according to the given schedule. See below, how.

Choose your daily backup time and retention according to the policy of your company.

For the daily retention, use the hot repository.

Choose your weekly schedule.

Use the cool repository for the weekly schedule. (This is an edge case: the hot repository also can be used for the weekly schedule.)

Choose the monthly schedule.

Choose the archive repository to store monthly backups. (You can also use the archive tier, for monthly backups.)

Choose your yearly schedule and also specify the archive repository tier.

If you chose to have immutability on the repository, you will get a warning.

On the Settings tab, Enable health checks and specify the date. Health checks monitor the health of the backup files and alert in case there is an issue with them.

You will get a cost estimation on the next tab.

How to enable email settings

Click Configuration in the upper right corner of the console.

Choose General > Email.

Enable email notifications and specify the settings of your SMTP server.

Run the job for the first time

Choose Policies and highlight the Job, then click Start.

In case at the storage account creation step, you chose to restrict network access to certain Virtual networks and the public IP of your VBR server, you will get the following error at the first run of the job.

This is normal, because the workers responsible for running the backup job are not yet created when the storage account was created in Azure. The workers have their own network in Azure, which need to be added to the list of networks from which the storage account is accessible.

Open the Azure portal.

Go to Storage account > choose your storage account.

Choose Networking and under Virtual networks click + Add existing virtual network. Then choose all the networks that you see under the network of your Veeam appliance. The one that needs to be added starts with VBA_VNET.

Try to run the policy again. This time, it will run fine.

Priority

In case you have one VM which is included in multiple policies, based on the priority, the VM will be protected by the top most job alone, in the other jobs, it will be skipped.

You can change priority under Policies.

Highlight one of the jobs and click Priority.

Move the jobs around according to your needs using the arrows.