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runeron's avatar
runeron
Level 2
9 years ago

Restore from production- to test environment

Hello,

We are struggling with restoring backups from a production system (backup server & vmware ESXi 5.5 hosts) to our test environment (different backup server & vmware ESXi 5.5 hosts). Our systems are physically separated for security reasons, and backups need to be transferred via external drive.

Is there any (better) recommended way to do this? The way we are doing it now seems like a LOT of work for such a basic task. We are talking about ~50 virtual servers:

  1. The backups are taken in the "traditional" way with agent on each VM, due to problem with BE15 using snapshots (the delay during removal in the snapshots are too long, and causes major issues)
  2. We duplicate backups from the production system BE15 server to an external drive & add the DR files manually. We then connect this drive to test environment BE15 server, add the disk, and run an indexing task. After this, we do "Convert to VM from point in time" to recreate the machines on new host(s).
  3. It is not an option to run new backups on production system directly to the external disk (this seems to work, for some reason)

I was pretty sure this was working when i tested it (long time ago), but today when we were doing restores we don't have the option to do "complete" restores. The "Convert to Virtual from point in time" only shows "System State" as option (with the "edit" button greyed out).

If we do traditional restore to overwrite the "old" restored VM's in the test environment, then we only have "Complete online restore > Active Directory, ADAM, etc" under options; no "A Microsoft Computer fully selected.." option.

 

15
Windows 8

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  • Colin_Weaver's avatar
    Colin_Weaver
    Moderator
    9 years ago

    Not sure what you mean by "Indexing task" you should be running both an inventory and a catalog when moving a disk to a new server (before you can restore.) 

    • runeron's avatar
      runeron
      Level 2
      9 years ago

      Yes, sorry. I meant Inventory & Catalog

      • Colin_Weaver's avatar
        Colin_Weaver
        Moderator
        9 years ago

        OK so in that case you might be running into a limitation of the convert to virtual process because you are not attempting the convert from the server that did the backup. Note: I am not sure if this is a limitation however I doubt we have officially tested your scenario of moving the backup storage device to a different server and then trying to convert (or an instant recovery if it had been a VM backup)

        Basically backing up critical SDR marked respources is a requirement of convert to virtual - however the SDR file itself is probably not the key component of the requirement for a conversion as it is more likely some kind of metadata in the catalogs on the original server (and of course you are moving the data between servers) so may not have that metadata.

        As a comparitive note the .DR file is no longer the key part to DR situations where the Backup Exec server still exists (as per info in http://www.veritas.com/docs/000115832 )  as such you might find you can use an SDR process to get your machines recovered at the DR site  by booting a VM with an SDR disk and using the .DR file steps in that technote - if that works it is likely the convert to virtual needs the original server.