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VMWare VM Restoration Best Practices

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I have the need to expand HDD's on a server. They have 2 VMs currently being backed up with Acronis and its virtual appliance.

I would like to use the RUN AS VM restore for this as its much faster. The recover entire machine actually does not work for some reason and doesnt create a bootable vm (issue for another topic). 

I would like to do one of the following:

If possible I would like to do this option:

1) Run backup on current vms

2) Remove the HDD's and Install the new HDD's

3) Reinstall the VSphere and Acronis Appliance

4) Restore the VMs using the  "Run as VM" option.

Will this work? As I am removing the original Acronis Process? If so what are the best practices and step by step instructions?

 

 

Or option 2:

1) Run a backup before starting

2) Put in temp vsphere server

3) Shutdown current vms

4) restore using RUN AS VM to the temp vsphere server

5) Install new HDDS

6) Reinstall vsphere and acronis appliance

7) How would I then move the servers back to the new server?

 

I need to do this on Friday so any suggestions will be greatly apprciated. 

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi,

First of all sorry for the delay with the responce, hope it's not too late:

>> 1) Run backup on current vms

>> 2) Remove the HDD's and Install the new HDD's

>> 3) Reinstall the VSphere and Acronis Appliance

>> 4) Restore the VMs using the  "Run as VM" option.

The 1st option description you posted is the correct one - the process should be pretty much straightfoward. The only things which I can recommend to double-check are: 1) make sure that the backup location is a shared one, so that it can be accessed from the newly deployed appliance 2) After you perform Run as VM on the new ESXi host, remember to start the "Finalization" process, so that VM becomes fully migrated to the new storage (datastore) on replaced HDDs. 

With the 2nd option (when you have a spare temp ESXi host), in the end of the migration sequence, e.g. after step 6) , you'll need to perform Finalization of the VMs running from backup on the temporary ESXi host and after that perform VM replication of these VMs where the target for replication would be the new ESXi host with replaced HDDs. After VM replication the replicas should be converted into production VMs (Failover->Permanent Failover). In other words it would be a more complicated procedure.

Thank you.