Different components of the Azure Stack Hub environment have different requirements for backup and recovery. Components to consider include:

• HLH, hosted VMs, network switches
• Infrastructure
• IaaS and PaaS

Back up the HLH, hosted VM (DellEMC-MGMTVM), and network switches. Because the HLH is reimaged if there is a catastrophic or component failure, you must manually export the hosted VMs so that they can be copied to a Dell Data Domain or Server Message Block (SMB) file share. This task can be scripted and scheduled with PowerShell. After backup, you must share these files on the same backup share where the infrastructure backup controller stores control-plane backup data. We recommend that you organize your backups with a descriptive naming convention such as: Rack1/Region1, Rack2/Region1, Rack1/Region2, and so on.

Azure Stack Hub has an integrated Infrastructure Backup Service that is fully automated and backs up the Azure Stack Hub configuration. It must be validated regularly.

Infrastructure backups only cover the Azure Stack Hub configuration and its meta data. You can also use infrastructure backups that this service creates for the redeployment of the Azure Stack Hub cloud to restore identity, security, and Azure Resource Manager data. The Infrastructure Backup Service does not include user data and apps.

For more information, see Recover data in Azure Stack Hub with the Infrastructure Backup Service.

Dell Data Protection for tenant VMs is used to back up IaaS and PaaS VMs and workloads, as shown in the following figure. Data Protection can also be used to store Microsoft infrastructure backups on the same Data Domain or SMB file share.

The following sections provide more details for each component.