Performing VM Restore

In case a disaster strikes, you can restore an entire Nutanix AHV VM from a backup or snapshot. Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV allows you to restore one or more VMs at a time, to the original location or to a new location.

Supported Workloads

To restore machines to a Nutanix AHV cluster, you can use the following backups and snapshots:

  • Snapshots of Nutanix AHV PDs created by Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV
  • Snapshots of Nutanix AHV VMs created by Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV
  • Backups of Nutanix AHV VMs created by Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV (including VMs with volume groups attached and VMs with no disks attached)
  • Backups of Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere VMs created by Veeam Backup & Replication
  • Backups of virtual and physical machines created by Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux
  • Backups of VMs created by vCloud Director
  • Backups of Amazon EC2 instances created by Veeam Backup for AWS
  • Backups of Microsoft Azure VMs created by Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure
  • Backups of Google Cloud VM instances created by Veeam Backup for Google Cloud
  • Backups of RHV VMs created by Veeam Backup for Red Hat Virtualization

VM restore is supported only for snapshots stored in the Nutanix AHV cluster and for backups stored in backup repositories, object storage repositories, and on the performance, capacity and archive tier of a scale-out backup repository (except for backups stored in the archive tier that consists of the Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval extent; for those backups, you can perform Instant Recovery).

Note

You cannot restore VMs from backups stored in external repositories, Veeam Cloud Connect repositories and on tapes.

How VM Restore Works

During the VM restore process, the following steps are performed:

  1. The Veeam Backup & Replication console sends the restore session configuration data to the Nutanix AHV backup appliance.

The Nutanix AHV backup appliance prioritizes restore tasks higher than other tasks. If multiple VMs are added to the restore session, these VMs are processed in parallel.

  1. [This step applies only if you perform restore to the original location where the source VM is still present] The Nutanix AHV backup appliance powers off the source VM and removes it from the Nutanix AHV environment.
  2. The Nutanix AHV backup appliance connects to the target Nutanix AHV cluster over REST API and creates a VM in the target location.
  3. The Nutanix AHV backup appliance creates empty virtual disks in the target location. The number of empty disks equals the number of disks attached to the source VM.
  4. The Nutanix AHV backup appliance connects to the backup repository and restores backed-up data to the empty disks.

If multiple disks are attached to the source VM, the Nutanix AHV backup appliance restores these disks sequentially, one disk at a time.

  1. The Nutanix AHV backup appliance attaches the created disks with the restored data to the target VM disk nodes using their original bus.

The maximum number of disk nodes available on Nutanix AHV VMs for each bus type is limited. Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV can attach to a VM up to 6 SATA, 256 SCSI, 4 IDE and 7 PCI disks. If you restore a VM that has more disks of any of those bus types, Nutanix AHV will attach the disks to remaining nodes of other bus types in the default priority: SATA, SCSI, IDE, PCI. You can modify the backup appliance configuration, to instruct Nutanix AHV to ignore original bus types and to use a specific order of bus types.

  1. [This step applies only if the VM has volume groups attached] The Nutanix AHV backup appliance creates a new volume group with empty disks.
  2. [This step applies only if the VM has volume groups attached] The Nutanix AHV backup appliance connects to the backup repository and restores backed-up data to the empty disks of the volume group.
  3. [This step applies only if the VM has volume groups attached and you perform restore to the original location where the source VM is still present] The Nutanix AHV backup appliance removes the volume group that was attached to the source VM.
  4. [This step applies only if the VM has volume groups attached] The Nutanix AHV backup appliance attaches the created volume group with the restored data to the target VM.

How to Perform VM Restore

To restore a protected VM, you can use either the Veeam Backup & Replication console or the Nutanix AHV backup appliance web console. However, only the Veeam Backup & Replication console allows you to restore workloads of different types and to choose a location for the restored VMs.

Note

The SureBackup feature that allows you to verify any restore point of a backed-up VM is not supported for backups created with Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV.