Should you to shut down an Azure VM to back up?

Question

We've got 2x Virtual Machines on Azure running within a single cloud service on a load balanced set.

I want to schedule periodic back ups of the VM images in blob storage; so taking the active VHDs and copying them into a separate backup container.

The question is; can I safely do that whilst the VMs are online, or should I only do this when the VMs are shut down? If we restore from a backup taken when the VMs were online, will there be an issue using the image for a new VM?

Answer 1

You can now backup Azure IaaS VMs while they are running. You can find more information about that feature here - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/backup-azure-vms-first-look-arm/