I just cannot get my head around this in the land of the cloud. Any cloud.
My main reason to look at cloud VM (at the moment) is to take hardware off my worry list.
I have a server in a DC for a small business and would love to take an image of it and create a VM on the cloud. (how details not important for now)
So...
Does the cloud provider in general or say MS with Azure specifically, provide the "don't worry if the hardware fails, you won't notice a thing" scenario? Or do I still have to set up VM level backups. I mean a VM is essentially one big file - right?
By "VM level backups" I do mean the highest level backup and not data only backups within the VMs OS. I would of course implement "normal" user data backup strategies.
I ask this as when I was playing with the Rackspace cloud VM the intro talked vaguely about "if you are migrating from a physical server then you also need to...backup the system...etc" I may have misunderstood but it sure looked like I needed to take into account the possibility of their hardware failure by having a VM backup strategy in place.
I you haven't fallen asleep...
So any thoughts appreciated.
Cheers
Tom