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Restores

You can restore full virtual machines in place or to a new destination. Restores are supported for both Windows and Linux clients.

Considerations

  • For Azure Resource Manager deployments: You can back up virtual machines configured with Azure unmanaged and managed disks. From these backups, you can restore full virtual machines and restore guest files and folders.

  • You can back up and restore Azure managed disks that are up to 8 TB.

  • For virtual machines deployed in Azure Classic, data recovery to Premium storage accounts is not supported. This restriction applies for Live Sync, VM conversion, and VM restore jobs.

  • Virtual machines (VMs) with encrypted blobs can be protected and fully recovered. However, guest file recovery of these VMs is not currently supported.

  • If a virtual machine is encrypted using Azure Key Vault:

    • Full VM restores are supported per source subscription. However, restores of encrypted VMs to a different subscription are not supported due to an Azure limitation with restoring Key Vault across subscriptions.

    • Restoring to a different region under the same subscription will create a new key vault automatically, and the restore job will complete successfully. For more information, see AZR0002: Out of place VM restore to different region might fail when source VM is encrypted.

    • Keys and secrets are not accessible to subscription users by default when the Key Vault itself is restored. The restore operation will add only the application's service principal in the Key Vault access control as an authorized user. If necessary, the subscription administrator can make changes to these permissions using the Azure portal.

    • Microsoft restrictions for virtual machines encrypted using Azure Key Vault also apply to encrypted Azure virtual machines in your Commcell environment for restoring your virtual machine and Key Vault. For more information, see Azure Key Vault.

    • For VMs encrypted with customer-managed encryption keys, full VM restores complete successfully; however, for full VM restores from streaming backups, the customer-managed encryption key settings or disk encryption sets (DES) are not applied to the destination VM. You must manually apply the DES settings to the destination VM. For more information, see Configuring Disk Encryption Sets on Destination VM.

  • For Azure managed disks that have virtual machines configured with Availability Zones in their Azure regions:

    • If the selected region of the destination VM supports Availability Zones, the Availability Zone information will be restored to the destination VM. The restore completes successfully.

    • If the selected region of the destination VM does not support Availability Zones, the Availability Zone information will not be restored to the destination VM. The restore completes successfully.

  • You can back up and restore Azure managed disks that are enabled with encryption at host. This capability applies to Azure managed disks that reside on Windows or Linux VMs.

  • Restores to different hypervisors are supported when a VM is encrypted with customer-managed encryption keys.

Restore Process

A full VM restore operation includes the following stages:

  1. Engage the Virtual Server file system driver.

  2. For an in-place restore, delete the existing VM.

  3. Mount VM disks.

  4. Write data from library.

    • For an in-place restore, recreate the VM using VM disk data and the JSON configuration file for the VM.

    • For VMs that include Azure managed disks, the restore operation creates an unmanaged VM using a staging account, and then converts the unmanaged VM to an Azure managed VM.

    • For an out-of-place restore, create a new VM using the destination information specified for the restore (such as the ARM model name, resource group, subscription, VM size, and storage account).

  5. If a network security group was specified for the source VM, configure the same security group for the restored VM.

    If no security group was specified for the source VM, you can add a security group to the destination VM after the restore operation completes.

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