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Veritas NetBackup™ CloudPoint Install and Upgrade Guide

Last Published: 2022-03-28

Product(s): NetBackup & Alta Data Protection (10.0)

Microsoft Azure plug-in configuration notes

The Microsoft Azure plug-in lets you create, delete, and restore snapshots at the virtual machine level and the managed disk level.

Before you configure the Azure plug-in, complete the following preparatory steps:

Use the Microsoft Azure Portal to create an Azure Active Directory (AAD) application for the Azure plug-in.
Assign the service principal to a role to access resources.

For more details, follow the steps in the following Azure documentation:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/resource-group-create-service-principal-portal

Table: Microsoft Azure plug-in configuration parameters

CloudPoint configuration parameter	Microsoft equivalent term and description
Tenant ID	The ID of the AAD directory in which you created the application.
Client ID	The application ID.
Secret Key	The secret key of the application.
Regions	One or more regions in which to discover cloud assets. Note: If you configure a government cloud, select US Gov Arizona, US Gov Texas US, or Gov Virginia.
Resource Group prefix	The string with which you want to append all the resources in a resource group.
Protect assets even if prefixed Resource Groups are not found	The check box determines whether the assets are protected if they are not associated to any resource groups. The prefixed Resource Group must exist in the same region as the source asset's Resource Group.

Configuring multiple accounts or subscriptions or projects

If you are creating multiple configurations for the same plug-in, ensure that they manage assets from different Tenant IDs. Two or more plug-in configurations should not manage the same set of cloud assets simultaneously.
When multiple accounts are all managed with a single CloudPoint server, the number of assets being managed by a single CloudPoint instance might get too large and it would be better to space them out.
To achieve application consistent snapshots, we would require agent/agentless network connections between the remote VM instance and CloudPoint server. This would require setting up cross account/subscription/project networking.

Azure plug-in considerations and limitations

Consider the following before you configure the Azure plug-in:

The current release of the plug-in does not support snapshots of blobs.
CloudPoint currently only supports creating and restoring snapshots of Azure-managed disks and the virtual machines that are backed up by managed disks.
CloudPoint does not support snapshot operations for Ultra SSD disk types in an Azure environment. Even though CloudPoint discovers the ultra disks successfully, any snapshot operation that is triggered on such disk assets fails with the following error:
```
Snapshots of UltraSSD_LRS disks are not supported. 
```
If you are creating multiple configurations for the same plug-in, ensure that they manage assets from different Tenant IDs. Two or more plug-in configurations should not manage the same set of cloud assets simultaneously.
When you create snapshots, the Azure plug-in creates an Azure-specific lock object on each of the snapshots. The snapshots are locked to prevent unintended deletion either from the Azure console or from an Azure CLI or API call. The lock object has the same name as that of the snapshot. The lock object also includes a field named "notes" that contains the ID of the corresponding VM or asset that the snapshot belongs to.
You must ensure that the "notes" field in the snapshot lock objects is not modified or deleted. Doing so will disassociate the snapshot from its corresponding original asset.
The Azure plug-in uses the ID from the "notes" fields of the lock objects to associate the snapshots with the instances whose source disks are either replaced or deleted, for example, as part of the 'Original location' restore operation.
Azure plug-in supports the following GovCloud (US) regions:
- US Gov Arizona
- US Gov Texas
- US Gov Virginia

CloudPoint Azure plug-in does not support the following Azure regions:

Location	Region
US	US DoD Central US DoD East US Sec West
China CloudPoint does not support any regions in China.	China East China East 2 China North China North 2
Germany	Germany Central (Sovereign) Germany Northeast (Sovereign)

Location

Region

US DoD Central
US DoD East
US Sec West

China

CloudPoint does not support any regions in China.

China East
China East 2
China North
China North 2

Germany

Germany Central (Sovereign)
Germany Northeast (Sovereign)

Microsoft Azure gen2 type of virtual machines are not supported. Ensure that you use a gen1 type image to create a VM.
CloudPoint does not support application consistent snapshots and granular file restores for Windows systems with virtual disks or storage spaces that are created from a storage pool. If a Microsoft SQL server snapshot job uses disks from a storage pool, the job fails with an error. But if a snapshot job for virtual machine which is in a connected state is triggered, the job might be successful. In this case, the file system quiescing and indexing is skipped. The restore job for such an individual disk to original location also fails. In this condition, the host might move to an unrecoverable state and requires a manual recovery.