Testing VM Restoration - VMware ESX 4.1

[Crazy_Excalibur]

I am using Backup Exec 2012 with the VMware Agents to do backups of my VMs on ESX 4.1 The backups work fine and I can restore to a local drive with file redirection. I am curious though as to how best test that the VMs actually work. Is there a way to maybe restore a backup as a new VM without deleting or disturbing the powered on VM (the one backed up)? Maybe renaming the VM or something like this so I can test the VMs powering on?

The only options I saw during restore was to delete the old VM and restore with the backup, which I don't want to do.

Thanks for any help with this.

[Matt_Freestyle · Accepted solution]

I havent done a vRay restore yet, but coming from a VMware background.. As long as the VM has a different name, isnt connected to the network and has its VMDK disks on a different datastore then you should be fine. The other thing you could do is restore the individual files, register the VM with the host (powered off), make the changes you need to make and then bring it online either in isolation on a dedicated vSwitch or without its network cards connected.

Hope this helps!

Matt

[Crazy_Excalibur]

Matt,

Your comments helped me do a successful restore. I chose to do a restore to a different vCenter Server, but put in the name of my one and only vCenter Server. This allowed me to choose datastores, vm name and whether to power on after restore or not.

I chose a new name, a different datastore then where the original VM was, and I made sure the NIC didn't connect when i powered on the VM after restore. This worked perfectly.

The option to restore to a different vCenter Server threw me off, as I only had the one server and I didn't choose this option at first.

Thanks for your help.

[Matt_Freestyle]

Brilliant - glad I could help :)