How To Guy

How to Recover a Virtual Machine with Veeam

Its Availability Suite v8 got a customer's vital VM back online in a snap.

• By James Brown
• 04/16/2015

VMware vSphere 6.0 has upgraded its virtual machine (VM) recovery tools from vSphere 5.5, with new offerings like Data Protection, Virtual Machine Component Protection and All Paths Down.

But sometimes I find that Veeam Availability Suite v8 is the solution that best fits a problem. Availability Suite v8 provides a recovery time objective (RTO) of 15 minutes or less. That was the case recently when a customer's critical VM, which generates a lot of revenue, was down and had to be restored. Availability Suite v8 allowed me to bring the VM back online quickly. In addition, Availability Suite v8 has built-in Automated Recovery verification, which ensures the VM wasn't corrupted or suffered any data loss. The VM had been backed up using Availability Suite v8, a necessity for recovery.

I used the Veeam Instant VM Recovery option from a de-duplicated and compressed backup within Availability Suite v8. The Instant VM Recovery feature is easy to use and doesn't involve siloed backup recovery teams to assist in the recovery process.

Here's the process of recovering a VM through Instant VM Recovery.

1. Launch Availability Suite v8.
2. Select the Restore icon in the restore menu at the top left.
3. Select the Instant VM recovery button from the Restore from Backup option.
4. Select the VM you want to recover.
5. Select Restore from original location (in this case, it was the quickest option to restore the customer's VM).
6. Rename the VM, because the original VM may be still be powered on and registered with Active Directory. If the VM targeted for recovery isn't powered on, it will make the recovery process more user-friendly.
7. Select the desired ESXi Host for the restored VM.
8. Select Connect VM to Network and Power On VM Automatically options. (Note: The Instant VM Recovery process will go through checks to ensure the recovered VM's configuration is successfully updated prior to completion.)
9. Click Finish to complete the VM recovery process.
10. Navigate to your VMware Infrastructure Client and locate the VM being recovered.
11. Open a console to log in to the recovered VM.

Recovering a VM with Availability Suite v8 is easy, reliable and fast. Availability Suite v8 has additional granular VM recovery and backup features. Also, if you want to recover specific files or bring that original VM back online in lieu of the recovered VM, you can do that.

[The author of this article has no financial relationship with Veeam Software. Veeam did not request a review or have any input into this article -- Ed.]