Feature Request: FLR to mount selected disks only

[nunciate]

Not sure if this has been requested or if there is a work around I am missing. I didn't find anything when I searched.

I have several large file servers. One is 10Tb (5 x 2Tb VMDKs).
I have a single job that performs the full backup with weekly reverse incremental.
All that works just fine. However when i do a guest file restore it takes a very long time to open the backup.
The restore has to mount up all the drives and it takes up to 45 minutes sometimes to get to a place where I can actually choose a file to restore.
I restore from this VM on a pretty regular basis given that it is our primary file server.

My request is for a way to mount up a single drive to make the restore faster. It would be nice if I didn't' have to mount up the entire VM to restore a single file.
If there is a way to do this that I am missing please let me know.

I also know that I could perform multiple backups where I only include 1 drive in each backup but that makes restoring the VM next to impossible. Also, I need the ability to do an instant restore if the entire VM goes offline so splitting the backup would not work for that either.

[foggy]

Alan, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

A question though - what kind of repository this backup is stored on and where is it located?

[nunciate]

The entire Veeam server is an HP DL380 Gen 8 with local SAS attached storage. The server has 160Gb of memory and Dual 8 Core CPUs. The server has 8 disk arrays attached to it.
This specific repository has 12 x 2Tb drives in a RAID-5 configuration with 1 drive as a hot spare. It is about 18Tb in size. There are only 2 servers that backup here and both are large.
Backup jobs are not running when I do restores. Also, tape out jobs are also not running at the time of restore.

[Delo123]

Our biggest Fileserver is 9TB's, but file recovery "only" takes 1 or 2 minutes to mount.... Hardware specs are about the same, just some more drives...

[nunciate]

Do you have multiple drives on the file server or 1 big drive? Just wondering if it is because we have 5 2Tb drives on the File server.

[Delo123]

We have 5 disks of 1.8TB, however within the VM we only have 3 volumes (the biggest is put together by using dynamic disk).

[nunciate]

What would work best is the ability to mount a single drive to another server and copy data from it.

My old backup software (which was horrible) had at least 1 cool feature. You could click a backup of a server and choose a volume to mount to another live server. Then you could robocopy or manually copy any data you wanted. Then dismount it and you are good. Was really quick.

[Delo123]

Veeam can do that also "somehow". Launch an instant recovery but don't boot the vm. Then attach the volume you want to another vm in vcenter (needs to be on the same host) and do your stuff...
When finished unmounts the volume from the production vm and stop the instant recovery

[nunciate]

Can you select only specific volumes to mount when doing an instant restore rather than doing the entire server? I have done an instant restore of the VM a couple of times and it also takes quite a while to load up since it has to mount up all that storage. I have not looked to see if I can selectively mount volumes that way.

[Delo123]

As said, you should initiate the instant recovery but not boot the to be recovered vm...
Now, on the same vsphere host: add the extent you would like to have to a running vm (from the mounted veeam nfs datastore) since every vdmk will of course be available there, so yes you can add only the volumes you want to have and do have to go through the hassle of actually booting the instant recovery vm and also you can restore your data right away since your vm is connected etc...

[larkrist]

O would like to be able to schedule Storage Snapshots on regular bases to deliver short RPO during daytime.

[Gostev]

Lars, can you clarify how does this relate to what is being discussed in this topic?