The overall backup workflow is illustrated below:
Steps | Cloud |
Step 1: The Scheduler triggers the backup job per the backup policy schedule. | Druva AWS Cloud |
Step 2: Once initiated the backup job requests snapshots from Snapshot Orchestration. | Druva AWS Cloud |
Step 3: Snapshot orchestration requests snapshots of the Azure virtual machines and attached disks.
The Snapshot Orchestration component communicates with the Azure cloud infrastructure within the customer's account to orchestrate and manage the backup process. | Customer’s Azure Cloud |
Step 4: The Azure cloud infrastructure generates the snapshots for each disk attached to the Azure virtual machines. | Customer’s Azure Cloud |
Step 5: Job orchestration notifies Azure Data Services that the snapshots are generated. | Druva Azure Cloud |
Step 6: Data Services extracts the snapshots of the Azure virtual machines and attached disks. | Druva Azure Cloud |
Step 7: Job orchestration directs snapshots to the secure Druva AWS Cloud
Data transfer to Druva Storage is secure and is enabled for compression and deduplication to optimize storage utilization and minimize transfer time. | Druva AWS Cloud |
Full and Incremental Snapshots
Once a backup request is received, Druva identifies VMs to be protected and creates one full Azure native snapshot for each disk, during the first backup. The subsequent backup job creates a new Azure native snapshot that is incremental to the first full snapshot.
Each consecutive backup job creates an incremental snapshot, and previous snapshots are replaced by the new latest full snapshot.
The overall sequence of backup operations are elaborated below:
Identify protected VMs: Identify VMs to configure for backup from the management console.
Create snapshots for each disk on the VM: The backup policy executes to generate snapshots of each disk on the VM.
Data proxy in Druva account for protected VM's region: The data proxy on Druva’s account is launched based on the region that the protected VMs is assigned to.
Read data from snapshot: The snapshot data is read - full for the first snapshot and the incremental data from consecutive backups.
New blocks move to Druva storage: New blocks and any associated metadata transfer to the assigned Druva Cloud Storage.
Replace previous snapshots: The previous full snapshot is replaced with latest snapshots, which includes any incremental data. At this point the data proxy is removed from the Druva account.