Protect Azure Virtual Machines from failure and data loss using multi-disk consistent restore points

The requirements around cloud reliability are ever increasing and the future of IT is always on, always available and accessible everywhere. As more and workloads are shifting to cloud, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) of these workloads becomes very important and is a priority requirement for businesses.

To simplify and accelerate the development of BCDR solutions on Azure, we are announcing the public preview availability of VM restore point. VM restore point is a new resource that stores VM configuration and a point-in-time application consistent snapshot of all the managed disks attached to the VM. VM restore points can be leveraged to easily capture VM multi-disk consistent backups. A new Azure Resource Manager (ARM) resource Restore Point Collection is launched which will act as a container for the restore points of a specific VM. A VM can have more than one Restore Point Collection allowing you to create and maintain a Restore Point Collection for each of your different scenarios.

VM restore points are incremental in nature, where the first restore point stores a full copy of your data. For each successive restore point of the VM, an incremental backup i.e. only the changes to your disks from previous restore point are stored. The incremental design enables you to benefit from the data protection of frequent backups while minimizing storage costs. To further reduce your costs, you can optionally exclude any disk when creating a restore point for your VM.

VM restore points are always stored on the most cost-effective storage i.e., Standard HDD irrespective of the storage type of the disks attached to the VM. Additionally, for increased reliability, they are stored on Zone redundant storage (ZRS) by default in regions that support ZRS. If ZRS is not available in the region, then the VM restore point will default to locally-redundant storage (LRS). Each Restore Point Collection is billed as a separate line item which consists of charges incurred for the storage consumed by all the restore points in that collection.

We launched incremental snapshots last year, which capture data from a managed disk. You can use incremental disk snapshots to take backup of an individual disk, however, if you require an application consistent backup across multiple disks attached to a VM you can now use VM restore points.

Customers who are looking for a managed solution can continue to leverage Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery. For customers and Azure partners, who are looking to build your own business continuity and disaster recovery solutions, VM restore points provide a feature rich building block available natively on the Azure platform.

Get started

VM restore points are available in all public regions. Please review the VM restore points documentation to learn how to:

• Create VM restore points to protect the VM from data loss and data corruption
• Exclude disks that you do not want to protect as part of VM restore points to optimize costs
• Restore a VM and all disks from a VM restore point