Instant VM Recovery Query

[AlanM]

Hi

Case: 02081124

I used Instant VM Recovery this morning to recovery some VMs into a test physical environment using Restore to new location, or with different settings
I needed to keep the original VMs running as the recovered VMs was to do some testing - surebackup wasn't an option as I have a vmware and hyper-v VMs to recover and they need to interact with a physical workstation
My intention was to put everything on a separate VLAN so they could all talk to each other without impacting the production environment

However I must have done something wrong as the original VMs were deleted

I changed the host the VMs were restored to, I changed the datastore for the recoverd VMs, changed the name to a new name - but I think I preserved the UUID
There was no prompt to say the existing VMs would be deleted

My question is: Do I have to ensure every setting is changed for the existing VMs to not be deleted?

In having a look at this yesterday and noticed I received a prompt as I hadn't changed the datastore location - not sure why I didn't receive any prompt today

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Alan,

I changed the host the VMs were restored to, I changed the datastore for the recoverd VMs, changed the name to a new name - but I think I preserved the UUID
There was no prompt to say the existing VMs would be deleted

Whenever you register a VM in the inventory, it gets a new ID, so in your case everything was done correctly.

My question is: Do I have to ensure every setting is changed for the existing VMs to not be deleted?

Nope, there should be a pop up saying that you're about to delete the original VM. What does your support engineer say after reviewing the debug log files?

Thanks!

[AlanM]

I've resolved this issue. I re-investigated SureBackup and restored the VMs I needed without the appliance active. I then manually changed the networking on each of the restored VMs to what I required and they all worked fine on the separate VLAN with the physical workstation and I achieved the outcome I needed. Since I have resolved the issue, the support engineer hasn't followed it up any further other than saying they are glad the issue is resolved.

[Vitaliy S.]

Alan, thanks for the update, but now I'm a bit confused You're referring to Instant VM Recovery, but talk about SureBackup jobs and appliances. IVMR doesn't use appliance at all, so I guess you've used this feature to bring your VMs back to production, right? Lastly, SureBackup doesn't delete the original VM, while IVMR should have a pop-up suggesting to do that when restoring to the original location.

[mpark]

Sounds like Alan restored the original VM back in production and then looked into the SureBackup, and got it to work

Vitaly, I don't mean to hijack the thread but couldn't help but ask. In the case of VMWare environment Instant VM Recovery, you can restore the VM back into the production while having the original VM still intact, but with HyperV the original VM must be deleted/overwritten before the new VM can be restored. Why is that?
For example, if you do instant VM recovery in VMWare side, within vCenter, you can have two identical VMs with just different name tag while in HyperV you cant do that.

[Vitaliy S.]

Good question, when you're restoring back to production in VMware, you need to either delete the original VM or rename the VM to be able to host it on the same server. This logic should be applicable to both platforms.

[mpark]

Ah, you are probably right. I did not rename the VM on HyperV prior to testing out Instant VM recovery. I'll give that a try. Thanks as always!