Restoring VM's that are using VVols

[rfn]

Hi,

We're running vSphere 6.7 and are using a Nimble HF40 for our storage. Our VM's are stored on traditional VMFS datastores, but I have ben experimenting a little with VVols to see if there's any benefits.

Veeam can backup the VM's on VVols with no problem, but what happens if I need to restore a VVol VM to some storage where the VVols is not there? It could be a new storage system, or maybe the VM has been deleted on our Nimble, together with it's VVol volumes. Will a restore recreate the VVols on the Nimble, or do we have to restore to VMFS? I haven't tested this and would like to know how it works before I try it out.

Thanks!

/René

[Andreas Neufert]

Yes, VVOL VMs are in the end vmdk based VMs that you can restore to any other datastore.
You can simple test this even without Veeam by creating a simple VM and do a storage vmotion to a non VVOL storage.

[rfn]

I was also expecting that to be possible, but does that mean, that in a restore scenario we would have to restore to normal VMFS datastores and then storage migrate to VVols? Or is it possible to choose VVols as a target and have VVol LUN's created automatically?

I hope that it's understandable

[veremin]

You can use VVOL datastore as restoration target, sure - no need to leverage general datastore as transition zone. Thanks!

[rfn]

Ok. Great.

Thanks!