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jjimenez2's avatar
jjimenez2
Level 5
5 years ago

VMware Restore Inquiry

Hi guys,

We have receive a multiple inquiry from our customer regarding on netbackup VMware Recovery.

Here are the list of those.

1. Instant Recovery and Instant Access is same function?

2. During creation of instant access VM, Is the VM use temporarily the backup storage appliance as storage of that VM? how about the resources of VM?

3. When the customer still have windows 2003 OS of VM, GRT still supported? Can we recover the legacy OS of VM by full image recovery not the file level recovery?

Scenario: The customer have a more than 250 GB of VM backup size and running on legacy VM 2003, so if GRT is not supported and they are required to recover some files which needs a datastore space but what is the best practice of backup and recovery for this scenario?

Do we need to recover the full VMDK backup one time and then on later time we can recover incremental VMDK Recovery?

  • bhdrkzltn's avatar
    bhdrkzltn
    5 years ago

    Hi,

    Instant Recovery (IR) and Instant Access (IA) are two different techologies. The IR is based on OST libraries and spesific to VMware. The IA leverages vpfs (internal to Veritas) to present backup images to the applications and not limited with VMware technically.

    As of now (NBU 8.2/3.2), IA is NetBackup Appliance spesific technology and only used with VMware policy. The next release will make IA available for traditional media servers as well.

    Instant Acess allows you booting VMs directly from MSDP by provisioning VMDKs over NFS to the selected ESXi (compute power) host automatically. 

    Single file/folder restores (GRT) can be done if the filesystem on the volume is supported. Assuming that the filesystem in use is NTFS, it's fine.

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  • Hamza_H's avatar
    Hamza_H
    Moderator
    5 years ago

    Hi,

    you didn't mention nbu version.

    Questions 1 & 2: 

    You can create an instant access VM from a NetBackup backup image. The VM is
    available almost instantaneously, achieving a near-zero recovery time objective.
    NetBackup mounts the VM's snapshot directly on the backup storage device to
    allow your ESXi host or cluster to treat the snapshot as a normal VM.

    please take note of page 29 in this guide : https://sort.veritas.com/DocPortal/pdf/135031700-135031706-1

     

    about instant recovery : https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/doc/21902280-127283730-0/v75741283-127283730

     

    3- based on this document : https://sort.veritas.com/DocPortal/pdf/NB_70_80_VE

    page 28 : 2003 is supported for file-level recovery , I suppose this is what you meant by 'grt"

     

    othewise, please explain more what you want because it is a little bit "not clear" what you are asking...

     

     

    • jjimenez2's avatar
      jjimenez2
      Level 5
      5 years ago

      Hi,

      The NBU version of Master is 8.2 and they have 8.1.1/3.1.2 media appliance 5240.

      We have an issue on those VM running windows 2003 OS.

      I understand that we cannot recover the file/folders using java console BAR so we see two options:

      1. We will recover the VM in VMDK image recovery but the issue here is when we will recover the full image backup they have limited datastore.For example they only have 170 GB space and the restore size is 234 GB.

      Another question is If the customer have a full VM backup running every sunday and incremental daily then the VM got deleted so they need to restore the Full Vm backup and they need the incremental backup on thursday, What is the approach during restore and datastore also need to increase the size?

      2. We will recover the files using the instant access but not sure if 2003 is supported by instant access, I read some articles that this is agentlesss approach.

       

       

      • davidmoline's avatar
        davidmoline
        Level 6
        5 years ago

        You should be able to use the BAR gui to recover files/folders from the VM backup.

        When using instant access/recovery, the VM is presented directly from the backup store via NFS to the VMware environment, so no space (yet) is required on the existing datastores. With Instant recovery, you must also define a temporary location on a writable datastore which the VM uses for transaction logging while you storage vmotion the VM back to a suitable location. 

        To recover files back to a VM, you either need to have an agent installed for a traditional NetBackup restore, or with a VM that is supported, it can be done using the agentless approach. I very much doubt Windows 2003 would be supported for the later (the agentless approach downloads a temporary package to the VM to perform the restore, and it is very unlikely this would function on 2003 - especially if it is 32 bit, as Veritas has effectively dropped all 32bit OS support). 

        As for your question on Full/Incr behaviour, I'm not 100% sure, but due to the way the backup image is stored, the instant access/recovery "image" presented, should be the entire VM (I could be wrong, but I don't think so).

  • bhdrkzltn's avatar
    bhdrkzltn
    Level 4
    5 years ago

    Hi,

    Instant Recovery (IR) and Instant Access (IA) are two different techologies. The IR is based on OST libraries and spesific to VMware. The IA leverages vpfs (internal to Veritas) to present backup images to the applications and not limited with VMware technically.

    As of now (NBU 8.2/3.2), IA is NetBackup Appliance spesific technology and only used with VMware policy. The next release will make IA available for traditional media servers as well.

    Instant Acess allows you booting VMs directly from MSDP by provisioning VMDKs over NFS to the selected ESXi (compute power) host automatically. 

    Single file/folder restores (GRT) can be done if the filesystem on the volume is supported. Assuming that the filesystem in use is NTFS, it's fine.

    • jjimenez2's avatar
      jjimenez2
      Level 5
      5 years ago

      Another question for instant access is can we recover files to VM after creation of Instant Access?

      The customer plan is to recover the files/folder with agentless approach becasue the win 2003 is not supported when using agent so we will be using the Instant access to recover the files but not sure if it works for win 2003 VM.

      • davidmoline's avatar
        davidmoline
        Level 6
        5 years ago

        If you use instant access, this allows you to browse, view and download the files. The bility then to copy them back to the Windows 2003 VM will be up to whatever access controls are in place (i.e. one you can browse the files, there is nothing froma NetBackup point of view stopping you copying the files whereever you want and are able).