Azure VM Plugin: Backup Strategies

Bacula Enterprise Only

This solution is only available for Bacula Enterprise. For subscription inquiries, please reach out to sales@baculasystems.com.

Installing Bacula Client on Each Guest

This strategy works by installing a Bacula Enterprise File Daemon on every virtual machine as if they were normal physical clients. In order to optimize the I/O usage on the Azure-VM hypervisor, the user will use Bacula’s Schedules, Priorities, and Maximum Concurrent Jobs to spread backup jobs over the backup window. Since all VMs could use the same storage on the Microsoft Azure hypervisor, running all backup jobs at the same time could create a bottleneck on the disk/network subsystem since Bacula will walk through all filesystems to open/read/close/stat files.

Installing a Bacula Enterprise File Daemon on each virtual machine permits to manage virtual servers like physical servers and also to use all Bacula Enterprise’s features such as:

Quick restores of individual files.
Checksum of individual files for Virus and Spyware detection.
Verify Jobs.
File/Directory exclusion (such as swap or temporary files).
File level compression.
Accurate backups.

Image Backup with Azure-VM Plugin

With the image backup level strategy, the Bacula Enterprise Azure-VM Plugin will save the Client disks at the raw level, in the Azure context.

Bacula’s Azure-VM plugin will read and save content of virtual machines disks using snapshots.

During backups, Azure plugin will save the integrity of disks images and also guest VM configurations to allow guest VM restores with their original parameters.