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Instant recovery

Instant recovery enables you to recover a failed or corrupted virtual machine and access it in minutes.

To perform instant recovery, select a recovery point associated with a full, incremental, or differential backup, and the appliance creates a new virtual machine 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 is migrated to the new VM. The recovered VM is 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. The recovery target must be added to the appliance storing the backup or imported backup copy to be used 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:

Audit mode
Instant recovery mode

Audit mode

Performing instant recovery in audit mode enables you to verify that a virtual machine 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 virtual machine on the target host. This disk image is referred to as a recovery object. Although the virtual machine 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 virtual machine in audit mode is not intended for production use. It does not have network connectivity and changes made to the virtual machine in audit mode are not backed up on the Unitrends appliance. Recovering a virtual machine in audit mode has no impact on the original virtual machine. 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 virtual machine 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.

Instant recovery mode

Performing instant recovery enables you to replace a failed or corrupted virtual machine. 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 virtual machine on the target host.

The new VM is available for use immediately. The Unitrends appliance utilizes 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.