Restore Question

[KiwiJJ]

I built a ESXi 5.0 box using a free license to act as our DR server. I had installed Veeam 5 on a workstation and was able to restore VM's to the ESXi host without any problems. I then upgraded our production systems to Veeam 6 and thought I may as well put Veeam 6 on the DR workstation as well.
Then when I went to restore the VM's they would not work and threw out an error that said -

"Restore job failed Error: Storage version [-805253115] is not supported for read-only access ..."

I was wondering if it is because I am restoring to the free version of ESXi ?

Support case # 5201347

John

[Gostev]

"Restore job failed Error: Storage version [-805253115] is not supported for read-only access ..."
I was wondering if it is because I am restoring to the free version of ESXi ?

Most likely. We do not support free ESXi, because it has most APIs locked down by VMware.

[KiwiJJ]

[merged]

Hi,
I backup using Veeam 6.1 to a removable drive. Every 6 months I do disaster recovery testing and restore the VM's to an individual ESXi 5.0 server that has a free license.
This has been working well for years. I upgraded the PC that runs Veeam at the DR site to 6.1.
When I restore the VM's it all works fine except for one VM. Veeam support now tell me that they cannot provide support for this configuration.
I recall being specifically told by Veeam that this scenario works fine when we purchased the product.
Can someone from Veeam let me know whether this is supported or not.

thanks,

John

[J1mbo]

Could you post some specifics about the problem?

[KiwiJJ]

The VM that fails to restore is a VM with 7 disks, Only two of the disks plus the configuraytion files are backed up as they other disks are for databases and databse backups and are added manually after the VM is restored. When I do an "instant recovery" of the VM it starts up without an issue. When I try and do a full VM restore I get a Veeam error saying "Restore job failed, (servername).vmx not found. When I look via the VI client the vmx file is there, I can copy it to my PC and open it fine. I have also tried just restoring the VM files but when when I start the VM i get a VMware message saying "the (servername).vmdk file is locked". I have tried multiple backups but the errors are always the same.

[KiwiJJ]

I have resolved the issue. What I did was create a new VM and use the existing disks and this worked fine. Therefore the issue to me seemed to be with the VMX file. Now, what I assume is, because the backup only backs up two disks and the VMX file contain reference to 7 disks, when I restored the VM and only the two disks backed up it gets a bit confused. So what I did was restore the VM which failed with the VMX file not found. I then performed a “VM File Restore” then in the VI client I removed reference to the other 5 disks which then updated the VMX file. I then powered on the VM ok.

You cannot restore a VM that does not include all of the disks and you must therefore restore using the VM files only option.

Obviously something has changed in version 6 as this never happened in version 5. In version 5 it restored just fine using the Full VM restore option, so this adds a bunch more steps to the DR plan.

Veeam support are still telling me that it is not possible to restore to free ESXi. You can take it from me that you can

[foggy]

Looks like similar issue to this one: RestoreVM failed with secondary HD lost.

Nothing to do with the free hypervisor, however. Even though it might work, free ESXi is generally not supported (this is covered in the release notes).