It’s funny how in the industry some new vendors come into the field and they have the exact same or similar technology that allows you to bring a machine up in minutes or seconds and telling a great story about how this can be used for fast recovery back into production. But also, how this can be used for test and development (because test and development or DevOps is the cool buzz word now)
As a technologist it’s great. The more the merrier and the faster we can get data back up and running within an environment the happier the world will be.
Veeam have had something called vPower NFS for 9 years! that’s the ability to take those backup files and present them back into your environment as a datastore and power on your machine running from your backup target… this is not new people! But it is smart!
What else came out around that time that I would expect a lot of readers have… the iPad? How many imitators of that are there? I for one moved away from my iPad back in the day and went with another tablet but usability and functionality pulled me back in back to the iPad.
I found this great reference from the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 in 2010 – https://slideplayer.com/slide/3486121/ oh how good the slide decks looked then, I might have to use this template for a session this year.
For nostalgia sakes I decided to take some screen shots of how this was presented back in the day when this capability was released 9 years ago!
With that same release back in 2010 was also the year when Veeam started the ball rolling outside the Backup & Replication space and allowed our customers to leverage their data with On-Demand Sandbox environments as well as being able to verify the recoverability of those backup files.
vPower NFS is the underpinning technology that allows us to achieve all the above. Its 9 years old!
It can be achieved through the easy to use wizard driving user interface but if you so wish you can also leverage PowerShell.
90% of the time people just want the fastest possible way to get their data recovered and that is not going to involve using a script in most cases, they are just going to click through the wizard and get things back the way they need to be.
Here is a demo video of me walking and talking through the instant VM recovery process with Veeam Backup & Replication, 32 seconds to recover a machine back into production!
But there is always a use case for a scripted / automated approach. This could be the testing and development angle if you didn’t want to completely isolate the workloads out of the production environment (I guess there might be some use cases for that)
Veeam PowerShell Reference Guide
Add-PSSnapin VeeamPSSnapin
#Below are the command sets for Instant VM Recovery
$server= Get-VBRServer -Name tpm01-112.aperaturelabs.biz
$rp = Find-VBRViResourcePool -Server
$server -Name TPM04-MC$b = Get-VBRBackup -Name "Backup Job - WordPress Demo"
$rr = Get-VBRRestorePoint -Backup
$b | Sort-Object –Property CreationTime –Descending | Select -First 1
$r = $rr[0]
$ds = Find-VBRViDatastore -server
$server -name "SolidFireSWING002"
$cred = Get-VBRCredentials -name "minwinpc\administrator"
Start-VBRInstantRecovery -RestorePoint $r -Server $server -VMName "TPM04-WP-01" -ResourcePool $rp -Datastore $ds -PowerUp -NICsEnabled -Reason "Data recovery" -RunAsync