Requirements and Limitations

Before you restore VM guest OS files, mind the following requirements and limitations.

General Limitations

Mind the following general limitations:

• Check the supported file systems. For details, see the File-Level Restore section.

• If you plan to restore VM guest OS files to their original location, VMware Tools must be installed on the target VM.
• You cannot restore VM guest OS files from a backup or replica that does not have any successfully created restore points.
• You can restore files whose names are written in all locales in the UTF-8 encoding. If the encoding is other than UTF-8, you can restore only files whose names are written in the English locale.
• [If you restore from backups with guest file system indexing disabled] To properly show the file system tree in the Veeam Backup browser, check that the /etc/fstab file lists disk UUIDs or labels. Disks listed using device names are shown outside the file system tree as separate disks.

• [For backups of BSD, Mac and Solaris VMs] You cannot restore files directly to the original location. Use the Copy to option instead.

• [For Linux workloads] You can restore files from basic disks, Linux LVM (Logical Volume Manager) and ZFS pools. Encrypted LVM volumes are not supported.
• [For Linux workloads] RAID mounts and restores are not supported.

• You cannot restore files from a backup created in the reverse incremental деmode if the backup job is being performed. If the backup is created in the incremental backup mode and the backup job is being performed, you can restore files from any available restore point.
• You cannot restore VM guest OS files from a running replica or if the replication job with the necessary VM is being performed.
• Veeam Backup & Replication must have access over a network to the guest OS of the target VM or direct access to the vCenter or ESXi host where the target VM resides to deploy a coordination process. The coordination process performs a number of administrative actions on the target VM guest OS, for example, collects information about mount points.
• The mount server, whether it is a helper host or a helper appliance, must have access over a network to a VM whose files you restore or direct access to vCenter or ESXi host where the VM resides. If a connection over the network cannot be established, the mount server connects to the VM over VIX API/vSphere Web Services. In this case, you must use a root account for a target VM, otherwise the restore process will fail.

If you use the FQDN of the ESXi host in the helper appliance configuration window, the helper appliance must be able to resolve the FQDN of the ESXi host.

If your DHCP does not provide the DNS configuration, assign the DNS server address manually using the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\DnsServersList]registry value. This value accepts data of the REG_SZ type, for example, 10.11.12.13. If you want to specify multiple addresses, separate them using a semicolon. After you specify the registry value, restart the restore process.

• You can restore from Novell Storage Services (NSS) if you use FUSE or a helper appliance. When using FUSE, the helper host must differ from the backed-up VM.
• Veeam Backup & Replication uses the ICMP ping command to define whether a VM is available over network. If the VM must be available over the network, check that ICMP protocol is enabled on the VM.
• The multi-OS file-level restore wizard does not support restore of deduplicated volumes (for example, Microsoft Windows volumes with data deduplication enabled).

General Requirements and Limitations for Restore from Storage Snapshots

Requirements for guest OS file restore from storage snapshots are listed in Linux, Unix and Other File System Restore from Storage Snapshots section.

Requirements and Limitations for Helper Host

If you select to mount disks to a helper host, mind the following:

• You can restore from ZFS using the helper host option if the zfsutils-linux package is installed on the specified helper host. The package zfs-fuse is not supported.
• The helper host OS kernel must support the file system that you plan to mount on this host. Otherwise, the mount will be refused and in rare cases it may cause kernel panic.
• For the helper host option, mounting of LVM snapshots is not supported. Thus, LVM snapshots are skipped from processing.
• If you want to restore files from a Btrfs disk and select the original host as a helper host, the mount of the Btrfs disk will fail. The issue occurs due to restriction of mounting 2 Btrfs disks with identical IDs to the same machine. To avoid this issue, use the helper appliance option.
• Hardened repositories cannot be selected as helper hosts.

Requirements and Limitations for Target Linux VM

If you want to save files to a new location, mind the following for the target Linux VM:

• If you want to restore files over network, make sure that the SSH daemon is configured and SCP utility is available on the target VM.
• Veeam Backup & Replication can restore ACL for recovered VM guest OS files. To let Veeam Backup & Replication detect the target Linux system architecture and kernel version, the following utilities must be present in the minimal configuration of the system: arch and uname.

Linux Firewalls in Helper Host and Target Linux VM

If you want to use the helper host option or if you want to restore files to a new location on another Linux VM, mind the following.

Veeam Backup & Replication automatically opens ports used for the restore process on the helper host and on the target Linux VM. Generally, Veeam Backup & Replication automatically opens ports for most popular firewalls (iptables, ufw, firewall-cmd). However, if for some reason the ports are not opened, you can open the ports manually. You can also specify these ports at the SSH Connection step of the New Linux Server wizard. Note that ports are opened dynamically: if 10 concurrent jobs are running, Veeam Backup & Replication opens ports 2500-2509.

If you use the firewalld tool, you can configure firewall rules to open ports only in necessary zones. By default, Veeam Backup & Replication opens ports in all active firewalld zones. If your firewall is configured for different zones, and you want to minimize security holes, you can configure Veeam Backup & Replication to open the ports only for certain zones. To do this, perform the following:

1. On the helper host or target Linux host, create the /etc/VeeamNetConfig file and define the following parameter:

where zone_name_1, zone_name_2 is a list of zone names where the ports must be open. Veeam Backup & Replication will skip the zones that are not in this list.

2. [Only for helper host] If you select a Linux host that is already added to the Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure, you should also add required zones to the /opt/veeam/transport/VeeamTransportConfig file.