Forum Discussion

ges87's avatar
ges87
Level 5
4 years ago

disaster recovery of hyperv server and VM

VSR version is actually 21

OS version WIN 2019

My server running hyperv has suffered the breakdown of the main Hard drive. I need to restore the OS partition and all VM

The drive was partitioned as follows

C for WIN2019 - system

D for VM VHDs

I have an image of C, but I do not have an image of D, rather I have a separate image for all VMs.

Now, I will need to start by restoring partition C for the OS, booting with VSR recovery environment. After that, how shoudl I proceed for VM?

Should I boot in the recovery environment and restore all VHDs, one by one, bootiung them in recovery environment?

Or is there a way to convert VSR image to VHD that can be plugged back directly to VM?

In the case I need to restore al VM by booting in recovery environment, I rememebr in the past I did this one time, and there was a problem that a second UEFI boot record was then listed in the VM profile, how do I avoid that? This is first time I need to restore a VM

  • Markus_Koestler's avatar
    Markus_Koestler
    Moderator
    4 years ago

    We do it like this: Create an empty VM, boot the SRD and simply restore that latest recovery point.

    • ges87's avatar
      ges87
      Level 5
      4 years ago

      but this means losing all VM settings plus hardware id I think...

      • Markus_Koestler's avatar
        Markus_Koestler
        Moderator
        4 years ago

        Hm not necessarilly I think. In case the configs are stored on C and only the VHDs on D...

  • akihiro1's avatar
    akihiro1
    Moderator
    4 years ago

    I understood that you have C drive image that was backed up by VSR on Hyper-V host and the image for VMs that were backed up by VSR on each VM.

    First, please restore C drive for Hyper-V host after booting from a SRD on the host.
    And create D drive and format it.
    Next, a new VM needs to be manually created on D drive using Hyper-V manager on the host.
    After that, boot from a SRD in the new VM and restore images for each VM.

    • ges87's avatar
      ges87
      Level 5
      4 years ago

      Hi

      yes I restored HyperV and it works fine.

      Hyperv VM configurations were stored on C, so they are saved, but of course they can't start as the VHD were on D, that was not backed up.

      I tried to restore a first VM by using "start virtual conversion". Result was very fast (12 minutes), but the downturn is that the conversion modified the image, removing some devices, like virtual network adapters. I understand that this happens because virtual conversion is designed to restore a physical PC on a VM. Then I deleted the restored HD and restored the VM as suggested, works fine.

      Why not including an option in virtual conversion to convert "as it is", to be used not to convert physical machines to VM, but to restore VM more easily? Is much more machinery to restore 10 VM one by one by booting, rather than running a virtual conversion job.

      • ges87's avatar
        ges87
        Level 5
        4 years ago

        I am now restoring another VM, and I got a problem

        the image set is incremental, with a backup every 4 hours, and optimization every 24 hours I think. So it is normal that The backup path does nto include all incrementals in sequence, as some are deleted when optimizing.

        However, when I try to restore this VM, that has a signle HD with 4 partitions, and I select the sv2i file, I get an error message, saying that it cannot find the incremental backup number 26 for a certain partition (but not for the other 3)

        In the screen where partitions ar elisted then, I get 3 partitions listed, but 3 correctly display destination: disk 1 and backup: 3 days ago, listing the incremental backup number 31. The problematic one, for which it was saying that it could not find incremental 26, instead, lists destination: none, and last backup: 151.XXX days ago, where XXX is a 3 digit numebr I don't remember right now.

        I am trying to recover it now by selecting partitions one by one, I will use an older backup for the problematic partition. I have no idea why this happens though....looks like a problem with the image set...