Before You Begin

Before you restore a machine to Microsoft Azure, mind the following prerequisites and limitations.

Prerequisites

• You must add a Microsoft Azure account to Veeam Backup & Replication. For more information, see Adding Microsoft Azure Accounts.

• You must configure the following objects in Microsoft Azure beforehand:

• Storage account whose resources you plan to use to store disks of the restored machine.
• Networks to which you plan to connect the restored machine.

For storage accounts and network configuration, you must use the same deployment model that you plan to use for machine restore.

• [For restore of Linux machines] You must configure a helper appliance in the location to which you plan to restore a machine. For more information, see Configuring Helper Appliances.
• [For speeding up the restore] If you plan to restore machines to a distant location, you can configure Azure proxies through which machine disks will be transported to blob storage. For more information, see Configuring Microsoft Azure Proxies.

[For speeding up restore from Capacity Tier] It is strongly recommended to use Azure proxy when you restore from backups residing on a Capacity Tier. For more information, see Configuring Microsoft Azure Proxies.

• You must create a backup of the machine that you want to restore in Microsoft Azure. For more information, see Creating Backup Files.
• You must check limitations for restoring machines to Microsoft Azure. For more information, see Restore to Microsoft Azure.
• You must set up correct time on the backup server. Otherwise you may not be able to add a Microsoft Azure account to Veeam Backup & Replication, or the restore process may fail.

Limitations

• Veeam Backup & Replication supports restore to Microsoft Azure for the following machines:

• Microsoft Windows machines running Windows Server 2008/Windows Vista and later
• Linux machines (see the Supported Distributions & Versions section in Microsoft Docs).
• Linux is not supported for UEFI to BIOS conversion.

• Mind the following limitations of disk sizes for Azure VMs and Azure stack VMs:

• [Azure VMs] At the release date of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4, the maximum size for unmanaged virtual machine disks for Azure VM is 4095 GB. For details, see Microsoft Docs.

When you restore a VM to Azure, VM disks can increase in size because of conversion. Thus, Veeam Backup & Replication does not allow to restore disks larger than 4093 GB.

Support of bigger-sized unmanaged disks is in public preview and will be supported in one of the following updates of Microsoft Azure. When the bigger-sized unmanaged disks become generally available, you will be able to restore VMs with disks larger than 4093 GB. To restore VMs with such disks, you must create a registry key with the following parameters:

Registry key location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication

Registry key name: AzureMaxDiskSizeGB

Type: REG_DWORD

Value: 8189 (For example, for 8191 GB disks, it is recommended to set 2 GB less)

After you set the registry key, restart the Veeam Backup service and the Veeam Backup & Replication console.

• [Azure Stack VMs] At the release date of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4, the maximum size for unmanaged virtual machine disks for Azure Stack VM is 1023 GB.

When you restore a VM to Azure Stack, VM disks increase in size because of conversion. Thus, Veeam Backup & Replication does not allow to restore disks larger than 1021 GB. You can regulate the maximum size of VM disks by creating the AzureStackMaxDiskSizeGB registry key as shown above for the Azure VMs.

• If the system disk of an initial machine uses the GPT partitioning scheme, the number of partitions on the disk cannot exceed 4. During restore such disk will be converted to a disk with the MBR partitioning scheme.
• The restore to Microsoft Azure functionality does not support the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit program.