Is your data centre maintained properly? Are you thinking about migrating your data centre to a more cost-effective data centre? What are the costs associated with the migration? Is your limited budget restricting you from starting your data centre migration project?If you answer yes to any of these questions, then this post will take you through the steps to using your backup to migrate your data centre to Azure with minimal cost, and maybe for free. So lets started:
Scenario:
A month ago, and after a long discussion spread across several months of planning, modelling and cost sizing, our management decided to migrate our mission critical workload to Azure. The project manager was excited about the new project; but, when we start weighing up the effort required to do the migration, we realised that the potential cost, the time it would take, and the availability of people and resources, it was going to hurt.
After shopping around for other options, we realised that we already had the tools, and the capability, to help us to migrate our workload to Azure, and it could be done for free. Yes. Free.
As we are Veeam customers, we are already using Veeam backup and replication to backup our VMware infrastructure to local storage, which is standard practice for most Veeam customers. As a Veeam customer, we notice that Veeam has released two free products some time back that can accomplish exactly what we are after; migrating our workload to Azure.
Solution Building Blocks
The following three items are the necessary building blocks that we will use:
- Veeam Backup Repository
- Veeam Direct Restore for Azure
- Veeam FastSCP
Deploying Veeam Direct Restore to Azure
Veeam has released a new free pre-configured Azure appliance that you can deploy from Azure marketplace. This pre-configured VM will read the Veeam backup and restore recovery points, and restore them inside Azure as a VM.
Veeam Direct Restore to Azure supports Veeam Backup and replication paid and free version in additional to Veeam backup for Endpoint. This means you can carry out a full site migration with using these Veeam free versions of Veeam.
Getting started
Let’s deploy the Veeam Direct Restore appliance first by following these steps:
1. Browse the marketplace and search for Veeam Direct Restore to Azure:
2. Configure the VM
3. Choose a Size (In this example, we will choose the cheapest option. Note: the VM which running the Direct Restore is not free):
4. Configure the Networking, and then finalise the setup (the deployment for this configuration will take less than ten minutes).
5. Wait until the deployment is completed, then connect to the VM using RDP.
6. After logging in, start the configuration of the appliance (Autoconfig will run).
7. Choose configuration:
8. Before you start using the Veeam Direct Restore to Azure appliance, you must provide your subscription file. Selecting the Configuration option from the main screen (to obtain the subscription file, click on the link).
9. Veeam Powershell security preparation:
By default, secure Powershell is not configured. You have the option to enable or disable the secure connection so that FastSCP can connect to the appliance.
In this example, the SSL secure connection will be disabled using the below. Let’s start by choosing the Advance Mode to access the Powershell.
10. Run Powershell, and then type the command:
“winrm set winrm/config/service ‘@{AllowUnencrypted=”true”}'”
Download and Install FastSCP
- Download the FastSCP app from the Veeam website.
- Start the installation (straightforward installation).
- After the installation has completed, run the FastSCP app.
- To configure, press on “Add Machine”.
5. Enter the server IP Address, port (default), username and password
6. Browse the server and then create a folder on D drive (temp drive)
7. Upload a folder. Use a Backup folder, containing Veeam backup files. In this example, we will upload and SQL Server backup folder.
Restore in Azure
After the folder has uploaded to Azure using the FastSCP app, we can now provision a VM from the backup files we just uploaded. Follow these steps:
- Choose restore
2. Browse the uploaded files, and choose the SQL backup file we uploaded in the previous steps. You will see the SQL folder in the LandingZone folder, under D drive.
3. Select the uploaded backup file
4. Choose the Azure VM Size
5. Change the name and the network configurations. In this example, the name is “SQL SRV”, and the virtual network is “SqlSrv”.
6. Finalize the configuration, and then start the provisioning.
7. After the provisioning has completed, you will see that the VM is ready to start up. The new VM is called “new-SQL SRV” in this example.
Note: Version-1 of Direct Restore to Azure does not support restoring to the Azure ARM model.
Conclusion
By following the steps in the example above, we were able to migrate workload to Azure with minimum cost, and without affecting the production. We have demonstrated using the Backup Repository folders to copy the server to Azure, rather than using the Production infrastructure. A much safer procedure all round.
Out of the box innovations from Veeam allow Veeam customers to backup and restore, and to migrate the Production workload to Azure. You also may have noticed that the source backup can be either VMware or Hyper-V. Both of these hypervisors files will be converted automatically by the Direct Restore to Azure appliance during the Azure VM conversion.