Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to recover individual virtual disks of a VM. Recovered virtual disks can be attached to the original VM or to any other VM. This recovery option can be helpful if a VM virtual disk becomes corrupted for some reason, for example, with a virus.
A VM virtual disk can be recovered to the latest state or any valid point in time. You can preserve the format of a recovered virtual disk, or convert it to thin or thick on the fly.
Evaluation Case
In this exercise, you will recover a corrupted virtual disk of a VM and attach it to another VM as a new drive.
- You can restore VM virtual disks from any backup that has been successfully run at least once. Open the Home view, select the Backups node in the inventory pane. Then expand the backup job and check if there is at least one restore point available for the VM.
- During the virtual disk restore, Veeam Backup & Replication turns off the target VM (the VM to which you plan to attach the restored virtual disk) to reconfigure its settings and connect restored disks. For this reason, it is recommended to stop all active processes on the VM for the restore period.
To restore a VM virtual disk:
- Open the Home view.
- In the inventory pane, select the Backups > Disk node. Expand the backup job in the working area, right-click a necessary VM in the corresponding backup job and choose Restore virtual disks to launch the Virtual Disk Restore Wizard.
- At the Restore Point step of the wizard, select the necessary restore point. If you select an incremental restore point, Veeam Backup & Replication will automatically restore data blocks from the full backup file and the chain of incremental backup files.
- At the Disk Mapping step of the wizard, click Browse and select the VM to which the restored hard disk must be attached.
- Select a check box next to the virtual hard disk that you want to restore.
- To change the disk format, select the required option from the Restored disk type list: same as the original disk, thin or thick (lazy or eager zeroed).
- Select the VM disk in the list and click Change. From the Virtual device node list, select a node that is not occupied yet. Click OK.
- At the Reason step of the wizard, specify the reason for future reference.
- At the last step of the wizard, select the Power on VM after restoring check box. Then click Finish.
Open the vSphere Client and make sure that the target VM is powered on and a new hard disk is attached to it.