This series is to highlight the steps to deploy, install, configuration and then how to start protecting workloads and then the recovery options that we have within Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV.
Everything You Need to for Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV
Now that we have the Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV all up and running and protecting our workloads, it’s now time to look at how we can accomplish the recovery scenarios. Today in the product and between Veeam Backup & Replication we can perform the following recovery scenarios:
- Entire VM restore (Proxy Appliance)
- VM disks restore (Proxy Appliance)
- File-level restore
- Application item restore
- Restore to Microsoft Azure
- VM disk export
- Instant recovery to Hyper-V VM
Entire VM Restore (Proxy Appliance)
A list of all Protected Virtual Machines will be shown here. You can either hit the restore or disk restore option here and then go through and choose your virtual machine or if you select your virtual machine below you will then see all the restore points you have associated to that virtual machine and can start the next wizard from there.
Select the restore button to begin the Full VM Restore Wizard.
Select Add, all jobs will be shown here.
Expand the job and you will see all associated virtual machines and the restore points available.
Click add, now you can define which restore point you want to restore back to by clicking the point button.
The next window will display the restore points available to that virtual machine.
Click next, you then should decide where you wish to restore the virtual machine, to the original location or a new location.
If you were to choose new location, then you will notice the steps for the wizard will increase to define the configuration settings and location for the newly restored virtual machine.
With new location selected let’s walk through these options, if you chose to push to original location you wouldn’t have to input all these additional items. It might be that you want to restore the machine to the original location, but you want to make a name change so that it is not conflicting with the live system.
You then need to choose what storage location you wish to restore this machine to, this will be the datastore to which is presented to the AHV cluster.
A reason should be given to ensure that you are keeping an audit log for restore operations.
The final screen of the wizard is the summary, this will outline the restore process, what name, restore point and the original name.
VM disks restore (Proxy Appliance)
There may be other circumstances where you wish to just recover a certain disk for a certain machine within the environment. This can also be achieved within the Veeam Backup Proxy Appliance.
Select Disk Restore
Select the restore point you wish to restore from.
The next step allows you to map the virtual disk to a specific target VM, this doesn’t need to be the original.
We then continue through the wizard with a reason for auditing and then a summary. The next steps are going to cover the recoverability options now within Veeam Backup & Replication.
Veeam Backup & Replication – Recovery Scenarios
Nutanix AHV backups are landing in the proprietary VBK format, within a Veeam repository we have the visibility of those files within Veeam Backup & Replication, also notice below the restore wizard options now includes Nutanix Policy.
File-level restore
If we want to perform granular recovery of files and folders, then we need to head over to the Veeam Backup & Replication server. From the restore wizard select the Operating system choice.
Windows
For this walkthrough we are going to use that same Windows 2016 instance we have been using to capture our backups. When you run through the restore wizard this way it allows you to see all available Nutanix Policies you can also navigate to the specific backup job and restore point under Backups and Disk on the Home page.
Above you have selected the backup job and virtual machine you wish to perform a file level recovery from. Now you need to choose your restore point.
Give a reason to why you are doing this and then review the summary, this will then start the process of mounting the backup file to your Veeam Backup & Replication server and you will see the explorer as per below.
From here we can navigate to the files or folders we wish to recover, we can copy the file to a location or use windows explorer to pick up the folder and move back to its original location. We do not have the ability to do a restore in place.
Once that restore function is complete you can close the window, and this will dismount the backup file from the Veeam backup and replication server.
Linux FLR
I need to add that if you require a guest file recovery of a Linux virtual machine then you will require a VMware or Hyper-V host to run the Linux FLR appliance.
Application item restore
Using the same process as above within the guest file recovery explorer we can use the Veeam Explorers to recover application items.
Active Directory
Exchange Server
SQL
VM disk export
Closing out on the recovery part of the series, I didn’t touch on but should mention and possibly point links out to them. But we have some extending available ways that we can perform against these Nutanix AHV backups.
Instant recovery to Hyper-V VM
To complete the series, I will touch on some useful resources that will help you get started and some useful pointers.