Application consistent backup for Linux VMs using Azure BackupAzure

We are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of application consistent backup for Linux VMs running in Azure online training using Azure Backup. We did a preview of this feature last year and customers are already using this framework for various applications like Oracle, MySQL, Mongo DB, SAP HANA, and PostgreSQL.

What is application consistent backup?

Application consistent backup ensures that the backed-up data is transactionally consistent and that applications will boot up post-VM restore. To ensure transactional consistency, applications need to be quiesced and there should be no unfinished transactions when taking a VM snapshot.

Windows has the Volume Snapshot Service (VSS) framework to ensure application consistent VM backup, but there is no such generic framework for Linux. With greater adoption of Azure Linux VMs, there is an increasing demand to backup critical enterprise applications running inside Azure VMs. We introduced a VSS-like generic framework for ensuring application consistent VM backup for Linux applications running on any Linux distribution. This framework gives you the flexibility to execute custom pre and post scripts as part of the VM backup process. These scripts can be used to quiesce application IOs while taking a VM snapshot that guarantees application consistency.

The framework, in fact, is more powerful as you can use it to take application native backup by invoking native backup APIs as part of the VM snapshot. Azure training Backup will then move this data to an offsite recovery services vault making it secure against VM corruption, VM delete, or disaster recovery scenarios. All this without the need to shut down the VM.

Key features

• Effortlessly test and restore application data:

You can now mount your applications directly from the recovery point using iSCSI. This will help you quickly validate your recovery points without copying any backup data. You can then recover specific application files without the need to restore the entire VM. For example, when there is a backup of an Azure Linux VM running MySQL, you can mount .sql data dumps from the cloud recovery point, directly attach MySQL database to this file, and quickly validate the backup or retrieve individual items such as tables without having to download the entire data dump.

• Improved monitoring:

With this release, any framework related error will surface in backup jobs to help you identify and easily fix the issues. For example, if you configured “Continue on failure” for scripts, the backup will proceed as a file system or crash consistent. However, the backup job will now show “Completed with warnings” and provide a detailed error message and recommended action to fix the script error.

• Application and distribution agnostic:

The framework is agnostic of Linux distributions and versions and works seamlessly for all supported Linux distributions as long as the guest application has APIs to pause and resume application IOs.

• Sample scripts on GitHub:

We are working with partners and ISVs to provide open source scripts on GitHub for popular Linux applications. As of this release, we have these in place for MySQL, Oracle, and Caché.

• Automation at scale with Azure CL:

You can now use Azure CLI to configure, manage, and automate Azure Backup tasks at scale. Take advantage of CLI features such as smart defaults for most common operations, tab completion, and pipe-able outputs to simply manage your VM backup and recovery operations. Apart from configuring backup and restore, you can also query command outputs to automate other management tasks. For example, backup health information can be programmatically retrieved, and subsequent operations can be initiated based on health status.

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Getting started

The video below walks you through various steps on how to configure the framework for executing pre-script and post-script. For more details, please refer to the steps to configure application-consistent Linux VM backup.

https://sec.ch9.ms/ch9/9d32/4e7535bb-3645-489e-86bb-69325ec39d32/restore-finalv2_high.mp4

You can now mount your applications directly from VM backup to validate your data, without the need to copy and backup data. Watch the below video for more details.

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