Instant Recovery to Quick Migration - Post Run Questions

[mlumsden76]

I got to do a real recovery. We lost a file server. I was able to perform an instant recovery from VBR and ran that from our backup storage for the remainder of the work day. Worked awesome. Next was to get 5tb of file server data back onto production storage. Configured a quick migration from the instant recovery, w/ delete source option selected on last step.

This ran through completion, all steps successful. It took about 18 hours to complete. The recovered VM booted up, instant recovery VM removed. What could have burned me was the unplanned downtime after the instant recovery VM was suspended on the copying snapshot task. During this time neither the recovered VM nor the instant recovery are made available. I completely understand why this is a necessary step, but it doesn't seem like there is a way to plan for the brief outage while the quick migration job completes its final tasks.

After 18 hours of transferring data, it automatically executes the finalizing steps that brought my recovery down for nearly 30 minutes in the middle of the day. Fortunately on Saturday AM, no one even noticed. Is there a way to have it run the part that takes 18 hours, and then wait to user commit finalizing? I could have easily had asked for downtime, and my 30 min outage could have been at a more ideal time. It's like once you start the quick migration, you're fully committed to the outage that follows at the end. It's hard to estimate how long the migration will take prior to running it, so I can't really forecast when the short outage will happen.

Looking to find out how other backup admins handle this.

[Gostev]

Most users simply have Storage vMotion licensed, which allows to finalize the recovery without any downtime at all.

[mlumsden76]

Darn, I probably could have made that happen. The next recovery should be perfect. Thank you.

[Gostev]

@mlumsden76 please note that Veeam will use Storage vMotion automatically (as long as it is licensed), so you don't need to initiate one through vSphere Web Client. This is just in case if this is what you think you're supposed to be doing next time