Backing up Microsoft Azure Stack VMs
The following diagram provides an overview of the backup flow:
As illustrated in the diagram:
A scheduled backup job is triggered from the master server.
Backup job for Microsoft Azure Stack is a compound job. When the backup job is triggered, first a discovery job runs.
During discovery, the first backup host connects with the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Endpoint and performs a discovery to get details of VMs and their associated metadata that needs to be backed up.
A workload discovery file is created on the backup host. The workload discovery file contains the details of the data that needs to be backed up from the different VMs.
The backup host uses the workload discovery file get the details of data that it will backup. Individual workload discovery files are created for each backup host.
Individual backup jobs are executed for each backup host. As specified in the workload distribution files, data is backed up.
Data blocks are streamed simultaneously from different VMs to multiple backup hosts. The number of parallel streams is the same as the number of backup hosts.
The compound backup job is not completed until all the child jobs are completed.