Restore full disk to another machine?

[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.

[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]

does this work with veeam v5

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, you can restore individual virtual disks with version 5 also.

[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.

[tsightler]

Even with v5 you can restore a VMDK back to an ESX host/VMFS store. Then simply attach the VMDK to the VM.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Gostev]

Hi James, I was under impression that thin provisioning is VMFS only feature...

[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.

[J1mbo]

Yes, the thin provisioning happens at the NFS server.