Veeam Instant recovery

[jxcclarke]

Hi

I recently have needed to use instant recovery which has worked sweet, however i now need to tidy up so when i performed the recovery i selected to store it on VMFS08 a new data store but it apears only the snapshot is located here and the base disks are by design mounted on the Veeam backup server and published as a second datastore that my restored VM can see, ive read a couple of Veeam articles which say to move the data store with v motion then unpublish the instant recovery in Veeam.

http://jpaul.me/?p=1425

As such but it doesn't mention this stumbling block ive hit

However when i go to perform the v motion it will fail because there is a snapshot which is the VEEAM IO REDIRECTION SNAPSHOT.

I need to move the base vdmks to data store VMFS08 where the snapshot file is located and merge it all into one current base.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Regards

[Gostev]

Hi, actually it is explained right in the Instant VM Recovery wizard that enabling I/O redirection option will prevent you from using Storage VMotion. Moreover, I/O redirection option is disabled by default... so you could only have purposely enabled that?

Your other options with Storage VMotion unavailable are covered in the sticky FAQ topic, easiest is to shutdown VM and use Veeam's VM Copy job. This will ensure that most recent VM state is picked up (including data in snapshot).

On top of that, you can use "standard" method of moving VM provided by vSphere client (migrate VM). This method is actually mentioned in the above referenced blog post.

Or, you can even use VMware Converter to clone this VM to another storage.

[jxcclarke]

Hi and thanks for the reply.

Yes i did enable redirection as i thought in a rush it would put the VM to VMFS08 but as i now know only the snap of live changes since i publish the instant recovery are located on VMFS08 and the flat files are on the Veeam Backup server published datastore.

The Veeam backup Server shows the data stores with the backup published data store and VMFS08 , im wondering if i can power down the VM copy the flat files from the Veeam published data store into the VMFS08 store with the live state snapshot all together then i guess i unpublish the instant recovery and start the VM check everything is ok for a while before removing the snapshot.

If i just unpublish the instant recovery what actually happens as ive only fond sketchy data on this so far ?

Does it remove the VM from the ESXI server ?

Does it move the flat files to my VMFS08 storage where the live snap is located ?

There was no snap before the snap was created by instant recovery and is called VEEAM IO REDIRECTION SNAPSHOT

sorry about the questions as its a steep learing curve

[Gostev]

Unpublish permanently removes published VM disks (including snapshots) from vPower NFS. So, you need to do what I explained in the previous post before performing unpublish. Otherwise, you will lose all VM disk changes that happened after instant recovery. Thanks.