CBT question

[DanielJ]

This is one of many strange scenarios I get asked about. Consider the following... A Veeam agent for Windows creates a full backup (entire computer) on a repository. This backup chain (consisting of one vbm and one vbk) is then imported to a VBR server, which then restores it into VMware, creating a vm. So far so good. Now the agent runs the backup job again, creating an incremental backup. This too is imported to the VBR server. Is it now possible to use this incremental backup to do a CBT based restore, overwriting the previously restored vm, updating it to the latest state? Or would the CBT data (as I suspect) not be available to the VBR server?

[Mildur]

Hi Daniel

Agent CBT and vSphere CBT are not the same.
Additionally, Agents can only be restored in an Instant Recovery session. Instant Recovery doesn't allow you to use CBT based restores (quick rollback).

May I know what's the use case is? Doesn't work Instant Recovery for this scenario?

Thanks
Fabian

[DanielJ]

That's right. I forgot that instant recovery would be needed. The use case would be to migrate a customer's physical on-prem machines into our VMware platform. The idea here was to minimize the required downtime by only having to restore changed blocks.

[Mildur]

Thanks for explaining the scenario. Do they copy the backups to a cloud connect repository in your environment?
Currently the product has no solution for your request beside using instant recovery. That should give you also a downtime from just a seconds or minutes.


Thanks
Fabian

[DanielJ]

They don't, but they will if we decide on that migration path. The challenge with instant recovery is how many sessions we can run simultaneously without the vms (or infrastructure) suffering too much. And giving an estimated downtime without being completely off...