Azure VM restore takes too long

Question

I am tried to restore a Azure VM which is 9878GB is size. It took around to complete the full restore. I am not sure if this amount of time is correct or i have missed something. I would have expected something most faster. Can it be because i have storage StorageV1 (general purpose v1) and option Blob access tier is set to cold? How can i make the restore go faster because 6 hours in my opinion is quite too long. Any suggestion will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Hello @mandania - Thank you for reaching out to us.

It depends on where the restored data was coming from. If the restore was from a VM snapshot (Instant Restore) then 6 hours is much greater than expected but I suspect this data must have come from the vault which means the full 9+ TB of data had to be moved/copied and therefore 6 hours would be expected.

Azure Instant Restore Capability - Azure Backup | Microsoft Learn

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Answer 2

Same problem for us restoring back to on-prem VMs from Online backups in the recovery vault.

A 500Gb VM can take 10 hours, which is ridiculous. I can only assume that in the back end, backup data is the lowest possible priority for Microsoft, therefore when pulling out data in an emergency, you simply do not get the performance you should.

When starting a restore, I can watch the process pull in NO DATA for about 18mins, then a few Mb, then a few Mb more, sometimes 400Mbits into our DC, then nothing, then a few more. It is so flaky the restore process, I hope MS are taking note. If we had a disaster and needed to restore 10Vms for instance, we would be looking at DAYS of waiting, this is not acceptable for enterprise.

Please MS, have a look at this for your customers.

Answer 3

Similar query here - understand slower speeds when pulling data (0.5TB in our case) from the vault but even restores from snapshot are hardly instant. Is it still copying back the entire 0.5TB from faster local storage or does it do any kind of difference block level copying? For on-premises, I was very impressed with Veeam - it's instant restores of a VM really were near instant as the backup consists of VM-ready storage. It connects the VM to the backup storage in seconds and you're back. Possibly at a lower performance as it's mounted on backup storage but you then transfer from the backup to live storage in the background. You don't care too much how long that takes.

So a better algorithm for Azure instant restores would be to connect to the snapshot directly and then restore to live storage in the background like Veeam. Just testing a new environment so I'm going to time restoring from snapshot.