Backing up Instant recovery VM

[mcgruenigen]

I would like to backup an "Instant recovery" VM before migrating it to production...in case something goes wrong during migration, as quite a few changes were made since restore.
Is this supported? Any particular backup settings to consider (native quiescence etc.)?
thanks in advance!

(Veeam 10.01.4854, esxi 6.7, vCenter 7)

[soncscy]

Just my take, doing a backup requires a VMware snapshot and I'm always wary about stacked snapshots (e.g., snapshot of a snapshot).

I'd try using Veeam Agent and do an in-guest backup "just to be safe", but frankly speaking, vMotion and the QuickMigration will use 'protective' snapshots so even if something _does_ go wrong, it would have to be so awful and catastrophic at the VMware level to really just make it unrecoverable.

So your call. If you want to play it safe, I say take an in-guest backups with Agents. But there should be no harm here.

[Andreas Neufert]

VM Image Backup from Instant VM Restore is the best way to go. I can not remember that I had once a case where this did not worked in the last 10 years.

[rennerstefan]

Correct, from a VMware perspective the VM created with IVMR is like any other VM and you can use the VMware backup options. Depending on how big your VM is and what load you generate the VMware Snapshot will take a while to complete (like with any other VM).

Another alternative would be to Power off the VM and do a VMware clone instead of storage vmotion.
I know, this is an offline migration but you will have two exact copies of that VM and you can always fail back.
Whenever I had such a situation (where it was a important VM) it was easy to convince for offline migration as the benefits are bigger than the downside. But of course this is highly depending on your requirements and environment.
Just another idea.

[Alfista]

Thanks for the helps.
I find that I had more snapshots before. When I delete it, then the backup was done correctly.
So the problem was in the snapshot of the snapshot by vCenter VM.
I need to care of it.

Thanks.