Fast Instant Recovery Single Server

[barrnunn]

I have a production SQL server that we backup with Veeam B&R and I need to get a backup of that server running in a test environment to run a SQL query and pull the saved query data from it. I have been able to perform the instant recovery of the server to a separate Hyper-V test environment with an isolated network. Since the server has the SQL Management Studio installed, I was able to run the query and save the data to a .csv file on that test server.

I put a test laptop on that same isolated network and am able to ping the server but cannot get to the network shares on it from the laptop because domain authentication is not available on the test network. I do not want to have to also recover an AD/DNS server just for this simple operation. I attempted to create a local share with full access to the shared folder and full NTFS permission to the folder/files, but without domain authentication, the server folder/file(s) is not accessible.

One option that did work, was to install SQL Management Studio on the laptop and access the server using a local SQL account through port 1433 (simple password authentication to SQL) and pull the data into a file which was then able to be copied where needed once the laptop was put onto the live network. While this was successful, we were just wanting to be able to extract the file from the test server without having to have physical connectivity to the test network as it is a remote location.

I tried mounting the VHDx file of the restored server from the Hyper-V server it was Instant Recovered to, but because Veeam is using a checkpoint the new folder/files did not exist.

I was wondering if files that are changed/updated on the Instant Recovered server get merged into the VHDX when the "Migrate to Production" is performed, but I do not want to do that until I am certain that the "Merge to Production" does not actually do anything to the real "Production" server. If they are merged into the VHDX file without affecting the live production server, then this should allow them to be extracted from the remote file without need for a physical machine being connected to the test network.

[barrnunn]

I actually verified with a test server, that the "Migrate to Production" of an Instant Recovered server to an Isolated network does not affect the live production server in any way. It simply finishes restoring the full VHDx file from the backup repository and then merges the changes and completes the restore job. I was then able to mount the VHDx file and extract the SQL query file just as I had hoped.