Virtual disaster recovery to Azure Cloud

To offer an enhanced solution, standalone Cove Data Protection (Cove) replaced Backup and Recovery. Where Backup and Recovery has been enabled and continues to be so for devices, the options presented here are still available.

If Backup and Recovery options are not present in your N-sight RMM, you need to use Cove.

To start a 30-day free trial of Cove, click the app switcher in the Product Bar, and select Cove Data Protection (Cove).

The Recovery Console lets you keep warm standby virtual images up-to-date in the Azure cloud. There is no such recovery target as Azure, but you can accomplish the task by installing the Recovery Console on a virtual machine in the Azure cloud and enabling the disaster recovery of your production systems into Hyper-V.

Please note: these steps are correct at the time of writing. However, Microsoft may change their process at any time, meaning these steps may become out of date.

Step 1: Create VM in Azure

Go to the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com and sign in with your Microsoft account. You will need to create an account if you don't have one yet.
Create an Azure subscription (if you do not have a suitable subscription yet). A free 30-day trial is available.
From the left menu, select Virtual machines. Then click Add and follow a setup wizard.

The following settings are important:

Set the operating system to Windows Server 2016 Datacenter or Windows 10 Pro (they both support nested virtualization).

For faster data transfer, select a location that is close to where the backup data is located.

Choose a VM size that supports nested virtualization: Dv3 or Ev3. For the full list of supported VM sizes, see this Microsoft article: Azure compute unit (ACU).

For details and screen shots, see the following Microsoft instruction: Create virtual machine.

Step 2: Enable Hyper-V role

From the left menu, select Virtual machines. Start the virtual machine you have created.
Establish a remote connection to the virtual machine (view Microsoft instructions).
Enable the Hyper-V role on the virtual machine (view Microsoft intructions).

Step 3: Enable virtual disaster recovery

Download the Recovery Console installer.
Run the installer and complete the installation.
Enable virtual disaster recovery to Hyper-V for as many devices as necessary.

Helpful settings:

Keep the LocalSpeedVault disabled in this configuration since the recovery is "Cloud to Cloud".
Location - this is where virtual machines will be created. You can use any path here, but typically it is C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Virtual Machine.

Unless you uncheck the Continuous Restore setting, the restore will begin momentarily and will update the image with the changes every time a backup occurs for this system.