Run VM from Backup - Information, Experiences and Caveats

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The run VM from backup is a great feature in Acronis, but the documentation and information around it is a bit sparse.

We had a critical VM fail yesterday morning and our business couldn't sustain the extended outage of restoring the entire VM (600GB Mail server). The only option was to run the "VM from backup" and then after hours submit the changes back into the backup set and then do a full restore ...

Here is a timeline of what happened:
5:30PM - Initiate Merge of changes to backup.
2:00AM - Merge Completed

The changes for the day was only 5GB ...

The restore from the new restore point failed and eventually at 4:30AM we ended up running the VM from backup again.

I am not overly concerned about the restore failing as we didnt have time to investigate it yet. But what is the recommendations around using this feature? Worst case scenario we will do a V2V conversion of the running VM and thats what we plan to do tonight.

But maybe the Acronis Boffins can give us some more insight into this feature?
Is that amount of time correct in adding a 5GB restore point?
Is this a feature left best unused? It was a godsend to us when our production environment went offline. 5 Mins later we were running again.

Maybe someone else on the forum have some good or bad experiences with it? I've tried searching but it seems like its a feature that's often overlooked.

Lun, 04/13/2015 - 23:03
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Hi,

In the current version of Acronis Backup for VMware the Run VM from Backup feature allows you to mount the VM and when you perform "Unmount & Save" operation what happens is that there is an incremental backup added to the archive which was used as source for mounting. Thus all the changes made to VM while it was mounted appear in the newly created recovery point, which can be later restored to preserve the changes generated while VM was mounted.

There is a simpler way to move the mounted VM into production (preserving all changes), but it requires vSphere Storage vMotion feature to be available: you can migrate the mounted VM to another datastore which will eventually copy all the data from the backup (which is accessible in read-only mode directly from the archive) to permanent storage and this will finalize the recovery of the VM. Acronis Backup for VMware automatically detects Storage vMotion event and marks the VM as restored one (as no longer mounted) after the migration is complete.

In the next version we're going to improve the process of moving mounted VM to production by removing the requirement to have Storage vMotion feature available (we will perform migration to production while mounted VM is running, thus without downtime or data loss).

There is one more possible alternative which is available in the current version (to keep all the changes made to mounted VM and migrate it to production with minimum downtime):

1) Restore the VM to production datastore selecting exactly the _same_ recovery point it is mounted from (the mounted VM can be still running at this time - no downtime is required yet). (!!!) Uncheck the "Power on target VM when recovery finished" box in the additional recovery options.
2) Make a snapshot of the recovered powered off machine.
3) Power off the mounted VM - to prevent further changes.
4) In Datastore browser open the datastore containing delta-files of the mounted VM - these are the files where the mounted VM keeps all changes (it should be in the folder on the datastore which you specified in "Run VM" from Backup wizard) and download all *.vmdk-files (select them -> right-click -> download). Two files with similar names will be downloaded for each drive (*.vmdk and *-delta.vmdk).
5) Note file names of all virtual drives in the settings of the mounted machine and in the settings of recovered machine. Rename each downloaded *-delta.vmdk file of mounted machine into corresponding *-00001-delta.vmdk of the recovered machine.
6) In Datastore browser open the datastore containing recovered VM and upload all *-00001-delta.vmdk files (captured at step 4.) overwriting the current ones (created at step 2.).
7) Now you can power on the recovered machine, it should contain all changes made to the mounted one.

If you're having difficulties following the above-described procedures please contact our support team for assistance.

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis Virtualization Program Manager

Mar, 04/14/2015 - 09:13
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