Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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sherlon86
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Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by sherlon86 »

Hi guys,

I have been using Veeam for quite some time but I was wondering is it possible to restore for example drive D; to another machine on drive E without using file level restore?

The issue is file-level restore is running quite slow, (but i am trying to restore about 200 gigs) any ideas on how to speed the process.

Thanks for any reply really appreciate it.
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by Gostev »

Hi Lontje, you could use the hard disk restore wizard instead, and restore the entire virtual hard disk attaching it to any VM you want. Thanks!
sherlon86
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by sherlon86 »

does this work with veeam v5
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Yes, you can restore individual virtual disks with version 5 also.
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by Gostev »

Actually v5 does not have this virtual disk restore wizard. This is the new v6 feature.
v5 can only extract individual disks from backups as flat files, and store them locally.
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by tsightler »

Even with v5 you can restore a VMDK back to an ESX host/VMFS store. Then simply attach the VMDK to the VM.
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by Gostev »

Not sure if you can restore disk directly to ESXi in v5... plus, you have to have enough disk space, as any thin disk will be expanded to flat. I've ran into exact this issue recently, trying to do something similar.
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by J1mbo »

Not sure if you can restore disk directly to ESXi in v5... plus, you have to have enough disk space, as any thin disk will be expanded to flat
Just another reason to use NFS for vSphere datastores IMO.
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by Gostev »

You mean, since NFS does not support thin provisioning, all your disks are flat anyway - and you will never ran into thin disk expansion problem? This statement is hard to argue, however I am not sure if this makes it a good argument to go with NFS ;)

For me, there is no going back to flat disks for sure.
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by tsightler »

Perhaps not with ESXi, good point. We still had a couple of full ESX hosts around in our environment that we used for restores because they were faster with v5.
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by J1mbo »

Hi Gostev, not too sure I follow...all files on NFS datastores are thin provisioned by default. Of course they can be inflated too, if required.
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by Gostev »

Hi James, I was under impression that thin provisioning is VMFS only feature...
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by tsightler »

As far as I know VMware always allocated VMDK's on NFS as thin, but earlier versions of ESX had some "features" that would cause thin VMDKs to be inflated when certain operations like storage vMotion or VM clone were performed. This made deployment to NFS datastores from templates somewhat problematic. This has been corrected in more recent versions but I'm not sure of the exact versions where these issues were addressed.
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Re: Restore full disk to another machine?

Post by J1mbo »

Yes, the thin provisioning happens at the NFS server.
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