Performing VM Backup

One backup policy can be used to process one or more Azure VMs within one Microsoft Entra tenant. The scope of data that you can protect in a tenant is limited by permissions of a service account that is specified in the backup policy settings.

Before you create an Azure VM backup policy, keep in mind the following considerations:

• If you plan to create image-level backups of Azure VMs, backup infrastructure components that will take part in the backup process must be added to the backup infrastructure and configured properly. These include repositories and worker instances.

• If you plan to create transactionally consistent snapshots of Azure VMs, make sure these VMs have the Azure Windows VM Agent (for Windows-based VMs) or Azure Linux VM Agent (for Linux-based VMs) installed. The same applies if you plan to use any restore points produced for these VMs to perform file-level recovery to the original location.

• If you plan to receive email notifications on backup policy results, configure email notification settings first. For more information, see Configuring Global Notification Settings.
• Configure policy templates that will be used by SLA-based backup policies. For more information, see Managing SLA and Storage Templates.

To schedule data protection tasks to run automatically, create backup policies. For each protected Azure VM, you can also take a cloud-native snapshot manually when needed.