Performing Instant Recovery for VMs

Veeam Backup & Replication provides two options for Instant Recovery of VMware vCloud Director VMs:

• You can instantly recover a VM to a vApp in VMware vCloud Director.
• You can instantly recover a VM to the virtual infrastructure. In this case, the VM will be restored at the level of the underlying vCenter Server, and the Instant Recovery process will be the same as for regular VMware VMs.

When you instantly recover a VM to VMware vCloud Director, Veeam Backup & Replication uses the vPower NFS datastore, just as with other VMware VMs. To import the VM to the vApp, Veeam Backup & Replication needs to associate the vPower NFS datastore with some storage policy. To do this, Veeam Backup & Replication creates for the underlying vCenter Server an auxiliary storage policy — Veeam-InstantVMRecovery, and displays it in VMware vCloud Director.

The created storage policy is added to the Provider vDC and organization VDC hosting the vApp to which the VM is restored. When the vPower NFS datastore is mounted to the ESXi host, the vPower NFS datastore is associated with the Veeam-InstantVMRecovery storage policy. After that, the VM is instantly restored in a regular manner and imported to the selected vApp.

When an Instant Recovery session is finished, the storage policy is not deleted from the Provider vDC, it remains on vCenter Server. This helps speed up all subsequent Instant Recovery operations. However, the storage policy is deleted from the organization VDC as organization VDC settings can be accessed only by organization administrators.

In This Section

• Restoring VMs with Instant Recovery into vCloud vApp
• Restoring VMs with Instant Recovery into vSphere infrastructure