Virtual machine recovery enables you to recover VMs running any operating system. This method restores the entire VM and associated metadata with the configured peripherals, from any given Unitrends recovery point. The appliance uses the backup or imported backup copy to recreate the VM on the recovery target. The recovery target can be the original host or an alternate host running the same software version as the original or a later version.
Select a full backup, an incremental backup, or an imported backup copy for the recovery. With an incremental backup, the appliance uses all previous backups from the same backup group to recreate the VM.
Unitrends supports recovery of VMware, Hyper-V, and XenServer virtual machines. You can recover the VM to the original host or to another host that has been added to the backup appliance. If necessary, add the target host as described in Adding a virtual host before recovering a VM.
Review the following information on recovering VMware VMs:
• | A recovered VM is configured with the latest hardware version supported by the ESXi host selected as the recovery target. |
• | VMs with hardware version 10 can be restored only to ESXi versions 5.5 and higher. VMs with hardware version 11 can be restored only to ESXi version 6. |
• | A recovered VMware VM is created with the following default name: <original_VM_name>_restore. You can edit this name when you create the recover job. |
• | Any Raw device mapping (RDM) disks recover as standard virtual disks. |
Review the following information on recovering Hyper-V VMs:
• | A recovered VM is configured with the latest hardware version supported by the Hyper-V host selected as the recovery target. |
• | A recovered Hyper-V VM is created with the same name as the original VM and no suffix. Due to Hyper-V limitations, it is not possible to rename the VM during the recovery, and the original VM is overwritten by the recovery operation if it resides on the recovery target. |
Review the following information on recovering XenServer VMs:
• | Unitrends recommends recovering to a XenServer host that is running the same version or a later version than that of the original XenServer host. |
• | A recovered XenServer VM is created with the following default name: <original_VM_name>_restore. You can edit this name when you create the recover job. |
Use this procedure to recover an entire virtual machine.
1 | Select Recover and click the Backup Catalog tab. |
Use Filter Backups to the right to customize the backups that display.
2 | Select a backup or imported backup copy to use for the recovery. |
To import a backup copy, see To import a backup copy.
3 | Click Recover. |
4 | Select from the following recovery options: |
Recovery Options |
Description |
---|---|
Target Location |
Select the host to which to recover the VM. |
Target Resource |
Select a resource pool. This field displays only if the ESX host selected for the target location has resource pools. It does not display when recovering to a Hyper-V host. |
Target Storage |
Select a datastore (ESX host), a volume (Hyper-V host) or a Storage Repository (XenServer host). |
5 | Click Next. A summary of the selected recovery options display. |
6 | If desired, modify the VM Name by clicking it in the Assets to Recover list and entering a new name. This is supported for VMware and XenServer VMs only. |
7 | Click Save. |
Notes:
• | Recovery consists of two tasks. The first recovers the configuration files or metadata for the VM, and the second restores the data. |
• | To view job progress, click Jobs > Active Jobs. |
• | The recovered VM is created in a powered off state. Go to the hypervisor to power on the virtual machine. |
• | After recovering a virtual machine, the next backup of the recovered VM is promoted to a full. |