VM Recovery

VMware Cloud Director VM recovery includes the following methods:

Instant Recovery to Cloud Director vApp — to instantly recover Cloud Director VMs directly from compressed and deduplicated backup files to vApps. Instant Recovery helps improve recovery time objectives (RTO), minimize disruption and downtime of production workloads. However, Instant Recovery provides for VMs “temporary spares” with limited I/O performance. To provide the recovered VMs full I/O performance, you must finalize Instant Recovery — migrate the recovered VMs to production environment. If you do not want to migrate the recovered VM, you can stop publishing it. This removes the recovered VM.

Instant Recovery to VMware vSphere — to instantly recover Cloud Director VMs as regular VMware vSphere VMs. 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 vSphere VMs.

Restore of VMs to Cloud Director vApp — to recover entire VMs to vApps. When you recover VMs, you extract VM images from backups to the production storage. This restore takes more resources and time to complete than Instant Recovery to Cloud Director vApp but recovers VMs with full I/O performance. You also do not need to perform additional steps to finalize the recovery process.

Entire VM restore to VMware vSphere — to recover Cloud Director VMs as regular VMware vSphere VMs. In this case, the VM will be restored at the level of the underlying vCenter Server, and the entire VM restore process will be the same as for regular VMware vSphere VMs.