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This headline may seem a little aggressive. You may think, Joey, I’ve heard you and other MVPs say that backups are the most important thing ever and I’ll get fired if I don’t have backups. That is very accurate, but when I talk about backups, I am talking about backing up your databases. If you are running an Azure VM, or have a good connection to Azure, Microsoft offers BACKUP to URL functionality that let you easily isolate your database backups from the VM.

If you are backing up your operating system and system state on your cloud provider, you are wasting storage space, money, and CPU cycles. You may be even negatively impacting your the I/O performance of your VMs. We had a customer who was doing a very traditional backup model–they were backing up their databases to the local file system, and then backing up the SQL Server VM using the Azure backup service. They swore up and down that backups where impacting their database performance, and I didn’t believe them until they told me how they were doing backups.

Cloud Storage Architecture

Unlike in your on-premises environment, where you might have up to a 32 Gbps fibre channel connection to your storage array and then a separate 10 Gbps connection to the file share where you write your SQL Server backups, in the cloud you have a single connection to both storage and the rest of the network. That single connection is metered and correlates to the size (and $$$) of your VM. So bandwidth is somewhat sacred, since backups and normal storage traffic go over the same limited tunnel. This doesn’t mean you can’t have good storage performance, it just means you have to think about things. In the case of the customer I mentioned, they were saturating their network pipe, by writing backups to the file system, and then having the Azure backup service backup their VM, they were saturating their pipe and making regular SQL Server I/Os wait.

Why Backing Up Your VMs is Suboptimal

The Azure Backup service is not natively database aware. There is this service https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-azure-sql-database which offers native backups in SQL Server for you. While this feature is well engineered, I’m not a huge fan. The reason is the estimated time to create a new VM in Azure is about 5-10 minutes. If you are using backup to URL, you can have a new SQL Server VM in 10 minutes. You can immediately join the machine to the domain (or better yet, do it in an automated fashion), and then begin restoring your databases. Restoring from the backup service is really slow, whereas you will see decent restore speeds from RESTORE TO URL.

The one bit of complexity in this process is for high availability solutions like Always On Availability Groups, that have somewhat complex configurations. I’m going to say two dirty words here: PowerShell and Source Control. Yes, you should have your configurations scripted and in source control. You’d murder your developers if their web servers required manual configuration for new deployments, so you should do the same for your database configurations.

If you have third party executables installed on your SQL Server for application software, then well, you doing everything wrong.

How I Do Backups in Azure:

Use Ola Hallengren’s scripts. They support BACKUP to URL. Add this agent job step from Pieter Van Hove to cleanup your backups

Sleep well. Eventually, there will be full support for automated storage tiering in Azure (it still has some limitiations that preclude it’s use for SQL Server backups), so for right now you need the additional manual step.

While I wrote this post around Azure, but I think the same logic should apply to your on-premises VMs and even physical machines. You should be able to get Windows and SQL Server installed within 20-30 minutes if you have a very manual process, and if you have an automated process you should be able to have a machine in less than 10. When I worked at the large cable company, we didn’t backup any of our SQL Server, just the databases.