Restore agent based backup to VMWare Cloud

[mdiorio]

We're migrating off of a hosted platform and onto VMWare Cloud for AWS. We have our machines backed up using the Veeam Agent and copied to a proxy server with repository in the SDDC.

We now need to restore these backups into the SDDC, but we can't seem to find a way to actually do this. According to this url, Instant Recovery does not work with VMWare SDDC. This pretty much matches what we've seen as the ESXi hosts don't have access to the vPower NFS mount to be able to mount the datastore.

Is there anything else that we can do here to restore? I'm hoping I'm missing something. As these are production servers we need to minimize down time, if I have to take a final backup, replicate it to the remote site, export the backups to disk, import them into VMware, mount them, our down time can be 12+ hours.

Thanks for the insights!

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
That is a compelling use case, without a doubt. I have been recently helping a prospect to do Backups to Azure VMware Solution, which is quite similar, and from there leverage the Restore Virtual Disk and inject it to a new fresh VM. It was due to Virtual Hardware compatibility, etc.

I can not think of any other supported way, as you are doing Agents, and our Instant-VM Restore to VMC is not allowed to the restrictions there. I can only think, as you mentioned, on Export to a virtual disk, you can export to virtual disk to a VMFS to an ESXi, if I am not mistaken, I certainly can do it on-prem, then create a new VM and attach these disks. You can automate this a bit using our PowerShell and VMware PowerCLI.

UNSUPPORTED, NOT RECOMMENDED
I was thinking of any other unsupported ways to do this that might help, but of course, as said, they are unsupported.
First would be to to create a nested ESXi on VMC, then use Instant-VM Restore to this ESXi, as it should have all APIs we need, ports, etc.

Once the VM is up and running and you are happy with the "performance", do either a complete vMotion out of that ESXi or leverage Veeam to make a Replica of these new VMs to the final VMC ESXi, do failover, etc.

Thinking out loud, let's wait for more feedback, as perhaps somebody else has better, and more supported ideas.