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I am trying to understand how to do a backup all of my stuff on Azure VM/Role

For example I have a VM and I have installed and configured various stuff like a streaming server via remote desktop.
Now what happens if for some reason the VM needs to restart, hardware failure is one example for a need to reboot. What happens, do I need to re-install all my stuff? So I don't get it, MS SLA guarantee 99.9% up-time for the VM, does this resolve to 0.01% chance of me doing the re-install? I think that the real chance me do the re-install is 100% sooner or later.

On AWS you can backup the EC2 to ESB or S3, you install all the stuff, take a snapshot and if the EC2 goes down, the snapshot is restored.

Here I found a post about how Azure doesn't support this, but it is from 1 year ago and I wonder if this has changed, but can't find any info. backup/snapshot a vm image (vhd) in windows azure

In the management portal I see a lame button called [reimage], but what it does is quite different from what the name implies.

If this is still not possible, I fell that this will be a deal breaker and I will have to ditch Azure in favor of a mature solution from AWS

Community
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Registered User
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1 Answers1

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It sounds like you're looking for the recently announced Windows Azure Virtual Machine (IaaS) functionality. This new feature allows Azure to compete directly with Amazon's EC2 offering. With a Windows Azure Virtual Machine, the disk is a writable .vhd file stored in blob storage. If the machine stops for any reason (hardware failure or manual stoppage), the .vhd just sits in blob storage waiting for the machine to start up again. This article from the Windows Azure blog describes the new persistence options provided with the advent of Windows Azure VMs.

Jonathan McIntire
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    Thanks, I have also found this link: http://yossidahan.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/taking-vhd-snapshot-with-windows-azure-virtual-machines/ – Registered User Jun 30 '12 at 10:28