Restoring VMs In DR

[leebtish]

Hi all,

We've been using Veeam B&R Enterprise 6.5 for a year now with great success. Loving the product and we'll be upgrading to v7 soon. We're about to perform our first DR test but have a few questions on the VM restore process in a DR strategy. Hoping someone can help or advise.

At present we backup to a physical repository and copy files to a portable USB drive then take offsite to our DR facility. We're currently waiting for our WAN link to be completed but it's going to be a while yet so can't use replication unfortunately. We'll be using SAN replication eventually.

We have a single ESXi Host (Essentials plus) at the DR site with local internal storage and SAN storage. My understanding is that we should be able to restore VM's from the USB drive to the ESXi Host. Is that correct ?

If so, I assume we will need another Veeam B&R server running in DR to perform the restore ? Can I simply create a new Veeam B&R server and use that to perform the restore ? We currently have 2 licenses for our 2 production ESXi hosts so would we need a 3rd license or could we revoke one and use it for the DR test ?

Any help much appreciated as always!

Thanks

Lee

[veremin]

Hi, Lee.

You can either use full installation of VB&R or standalone utility called extract.exe with which you will be able to restore VMs without install Veeam backup console. Though, you’d better have separate installation in DR location since it gives you much more flexibility: be it restoration from incremental restore points, granular data recovery, Instant VM Recovery, or SureBackup, etc.

Also, there is no need to have an additional license since VB&R concerns only with “source” where VMs to backup/replicate are located. In other words, as long as you don’t backup and replicate DR host, a new license isn't required.

As to restoring process, backup files transferred via USB drives should be firstly imported to the console of DR VB&R server, and, then, you will be able to utilize restoration functionality.

Additionally, there are some points to keep in mind regarding SAN replication.

Thanks.

[leebtish]

Hi,

Thanks very much for the quick reply. That's great! Answered all my questions very quickly, much appreciated. Thanks also for the info on SAN replication.

Cheers

Lee

[veremin]

You’re welcome. Feel free to ask, should any additional clarification be needed. Thanks.

[leebtish]

Hi there, hope you don't mind but have another question regarding restoring VM's in DR, more specifically related to failing back VMs. If we did enter a DR situation and were using the restored VMs for a few days, how could we restore the VMs back to the production site including the changes that occurred in DR ?

Would we need to backup the VMs in DR and then restore to production in the same way ?

Thanks for the help again!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Lee,

Yes, you can. To do that you should either replicate DR VMs back to the main site by mapping them to the production VMs or run the same procedure you did initially (backup VMs, ship backup files to the offsite location and run the restore job).

Hope this helps!

[veremin]

Also, providing that you have a host at DR site and have already performed a seeding procedure, it might be worth starting to use replication jobs, as well. Such scenario should guarantee that in case of disaster, you can easily switch to DR VMs (Failover) and, then, once production recovery is finished, switch everything back (Failback).

The main advantage here is that you won’t have to take any additional manual steps, apart from selecting VMs and choosing required activity.

Thanks.

[leebtish]

Awesome, thanks for the quick responses as always. I only wish we could use replication jobs but we have no network link as yet, been waiting 10 months thanks to local council stopping work.

When the VMs are restored back into production, are the changes simply "injected" into the VMware files such as he vmx etc ? Just curious in case we come across any issues.

Thanks again!

[Vitaliy S.]

If you decide to restore the DR VMs, then all VM files will be replaced with the new ones, you cannot "merge" the existing VM and the restored one.

[foggy]

When the VMs are restored back into production, are the changes simply "injected" into the VMware files such as he vmx etc ? Just curious in case we come across any issues.

If you are talking about fail back operation, then yes, Veeam B&R synchronizes the differences between the original VM and the replica. In case of full VM restore to its original location, the original VM is deleted prior to restore.

[leebtish]

Great, thanks for the info. Very useful.