Instant recovery enables you to recover a failed or corrupted VMware or Hyper-V VM and access it in minutes.
To perform instant recovery, select a recovery point associated with a full, incremental, or differential backup. The appliance creates a new VM from the recovery point. The new VM can assume the role of the original and is available for use immediately.
Instant recovery uses a backup, or imported backup copy, to recreate the VM in the target location. The instant recovery process also creates a disk image, known as a recovery object, on the backup appliance. Data from this disk migrates to the new VM. The recovered VM remains fully operational during the migration.
The target location can be the original host or an alternate host running the same software version as the original or a later version. You must add the recovery target to the appliance that stores the backup, or imported backup copy, intended for the recovery.
When performing instant recovery, you can choose to perform the recovery in audit mode or instant recovery mode. Use audit mode to verify recovery points. Use instant recovery to replace a failed or corrupted VM.
Once the instant recovery completes, tear down the recovery object to make the reserved space available for other instant recovery processes.
See the following topics for details:
Performing instant recovery in audit mode enables you to verify that a VM can be created from a backup or imported backup copy. When you select a backup or backup copy to audit, the appliance uses data from the backup or backup copy to create a disk image on the appliance and a new VM on the target host. This disk image is referred to as a recovery object. Although the VM resides on the host, it runs from the disk image created on the appliance. All other resources, such as the processors and memory, reside on the host.
A VM in audit mode is not intended for production use. It does not have network connectivity and changes made to the VM in audit mode are not backed up on the Unitrends appliance. Recovering a VM in audit mode has no impact on the original VM. It is not necessary to shut down the original VM during the audit, even if you use the original host as the recovery target.
After verifying that the VM has booted and its data is accessible, delete it from the target host and tear down the recovery object from the appliance to free the system resources.
Performing instant recovery enables you to replace a failed or corrupted VM. When you select a backup or imported backup copy, the appliance uses data from this backup to create a disk image or recovery object on the appliance and a new VM on the target host.
The new VM is available for use immediately. The Unitrends appliance uses Storage vMotion (VMware) or Storage Live Migration (Hyper-V) to copy the data from the disk image to the target host. Once the migration completes, tear down the recovery object to free system resources.