Restore Considerations for Agentless VMware Backup

General Restore Considerations

  • Restores require a vMotion license and fully licensed ESXi host.

  • A backup of a VM with multiple disks succeeds and is cataloged if at least one disk is successfully backed up. When the VM is restored it may not be restored with all the disks present at the time of the backup; only the successfully backed up disks are restored. In this case, a warning message appears in the job log for each missing disk.

  • You can restore individual VMDKs. To restore a VM with multiple VMDKs, perform a restore for each VMDK.

  • For a VM restore, you can select an ESXi server as a restore target. However, for a VMDK restore, select an existing VM as the restore target.

  • Agentless VMware Backup does not currently support application-aware backup and recovery; however, it provides application consistent backups. Application-aware backup and recovery is accomplished through DPX Block Data Protection, which requires an agent in the VM that is backed up.

Restoring from the LATEST Snapshot

The most recent backup snapshot is identified in the restore tree as LATEST. This unique label enables you to define restore jobs that always restore from the most recent agentless snapshot. This is useful for maintaining disaster recovery environments and for backup verification.

LATEST snapshots are indicated for Instant VM Restore and Full VM Restore.

In the case of different backup jobs protecting the same VM, the LATEST snapshot is the most recent in the Catalog, regardless of the backup job that generated the snapshot.

Datastore Considerations

  • For Instant VM or VMDK restore, no datastore selection is required.

  • For full VM or VMDK restore, if you restore to Original Location, no datastore selection is required. However, if you restore to a new location, you must select a datastore.

  • A temporary VMFS datastore is automatically created during the restore to store the VM, VMDKs, or both. The size of the datastore is equal to the VM memory plus 10 percent of total size of VMDKs. The temporary VMFS datastore is deleted automatically when the job completes.

  • Both VMFS and NFS datastores are supported.

  • To remove fully restored VMs and VMDKs, use vSphere Client.

  • VMware Virtual Volume (VVol) datastores are not supported with Agentless VMware backup to DPX Open Storage Server.

VMDK Restore Considerations

  • The VMDK is attached to the VM as an RDM LUN.

  • You can restore VMDKs to a VM that is running; that is, there is no need to power off the VM. However, in such cases DPX may use the cloning method, and you are not able to use the VM until the cloning completes.

VMDK Post-Restore Considerations

  • DPX creates a unique disk name for the VMDK to be restored, restores the VMDK to the target datastore, and attaches it to the target VM.

  • For VMs running Windows, if the target machine is different than the source machine, the disk may appear as offline and you need to make it online. The offline condition does not appear if you restore to the original machine with Check this option to delete the virtual machine if it exists on the target host selected.

  • For VMs running older versions of Windows, drive letters may be automatically assigned to VMDK volumes if the Windows automount option is turned on. Otherwise, to access the volume data, manually assign a drive letter. To access data for multiple disk partitions, assign a drive letter to each partition.

  • For VMs running Linux, mount the VMDK via operating system partitioning tools.

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