Forum Discussion

paolocorsini's avatar
paolocorsini
Level 2
9 days ago

VMWARE restore without access to vCenter/ESXi

Hi all,

I'm using  NetBackup and I'm implementing a Disaster Recovery solution, where source data are OnPrem VMWARE machines and target site is on Cloud. NetBackup is used to backup data OnPrem and to replicate data to a BLOB storage on Azure.

Cloud recovery environment is based on VMWARE too, but we don't have access to vCenter or ESXi servers (due to security policies, as this is a multi-tenant environment). We can only put the .VMDK/.VMX files on a shared folder, then the Cloud provider will import them to the VMWARE infrastructure.

My question is: can I restore .VMDK and .VMX files to a "generic" disk space (BLOB, shared folder, local disk... whatever/wherever) WITHOUT any access to VMWARE/vCenter/ESXi? I'm a bit confused, because from the documentation I've read, it seems that you can restore the VMDK/VMX files to an alternate path, but you need to have access to a VMWARE environment in order to proceed.

Any suggestions?

3 Replies

  • quebek's avatar
    quebek
    Moderator
    9 days ago

    Hello

    I do speak under correction, but my take is you can't restore vmdk files to any target... That option I think is gone starting with NBU 7.x where the VCB backup was withdrawn.

  • kiyan's avatar
    kiyan
    Level 6
    8 days ago

    Hi,
    You will be able to restore the VMDK, as you have mentioned to a VMWare/VCenter environment. Basically as you are using a vmware policy to back it up , you will be able to restore it to ONLY VMware environment.

  • paolocorsini's avatar
    paolocorsini
    Level 2
    8 days ago

    Thanks for the answers.

    So this means that I cannot restore the saved VMDK/VMX if I don't have access to an ESXi server (or vCenter) - That seems crazy to me, but OK.

    At this point I have another question: is there a way to save .VMDK and .VMX on the source environment as "regular files" (e.g.: like if they were .txt or .doc), so that they can be restored on the target environment without access to an ESXi or vCenter? My need is to retrieve these files and then let the cloud provider import them in their VMWARE infra (that I can't access for security reasons).

    Besides VMDK/VMX, I can also use OVF/OVA files, so my request applies also to this kind of VM images.

    Thank you!