Converting to Amazon

When restoring a VMware or Azure virtual machine from a backup, you can choose to restore the VM as an Amazon instance.

You can use this feature to migrate virtual machines to the AWS cloud.

If you are using the import method for restores, when you restore a full Amazon EC2, convert a VM to an Amazon EC2 instance, or replicate a VM to Amazon EC2 by using the import method, Commvault automatically creates an Amazon S3 bucket for the destination. The bucket is named gx-restore-region_name-account_id, where region_name is the name of the AWS region and account_id is the AWS account for the hypervisor.

You can perform VM conversions from streaming backups, from secondary copies, or from IntelliSnap backup copies. You cannot perform a conversion from a Snap copy.

Note

Converting Azure VMs that are encrypted using Azure Disk Encryption is not supported.

Before You Begin

On any VM that you want to import into an Amazon EC2 instance, you might need up to 2 GB of available disk space in the OS disk for installing drivers and other software.
When restoring an Azure virtual machine, do the following:
- For Windows computers: enable the pagefile on the C: drive of the source VM. This will prevent you from receiving an error message when you reboot the destination VM.
- For Linux computers : Ensure that the fstab entry of the source disk should be based on disk UUID and not disk name. If it is not based on disk UUID, then the restored VM will not boot up.
You can use any VSA proxy to perform the conversion, either running on an Amazon instance or externally with connectivity into the Amazon account. Use either of the following methods:
- Using an Amazon proxy provides faster performance. By using a VSA proxy running on an Amazon instance, the restore operation can write directly to Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and inject Amazon drivers that are required for destination instances. You must provide credentials for the guest VM. The restore is performed using the HotAdd method.
  
  You must install Xen drivers on Linux guest VMs before performing a backup of a VM that is used as the source for conversion or replication. Installing Xen drivers on Linux guest VMs enables the required drivers to be in place when the Amazon instances are created, so that the Amazon instance can be started and users can access the instance.
- Using an external proxy avoids the cost associated with running an Amazon instance. The restore operation uses the import method and the gx-restore-region_name-account_id bucket.
The VSA proxy machine must be able to connect to ec2.amazonaws.com. To route communications through an HTTP or HTTPS proxy, see Configuring a Firewall for a VSA Proxy in the Cloud. To use an HTTPS proxy, you must provide authentication details.
Back up the virtual machine that you plan to convert.
Create an Amazon hypervisor.
For information about the restore options for the Amazon destination, see Options for Conversion to Amazon.

Considerations

For information about Amazon considerations and limitations, see the following pages:
- Importing a VM as an Image Using VM Import/Export
  - Prerequisites
  - Limitations
RAID partitioned volumes are not supported for conversion and import into Amazon.

This consideration also applies to GPT-partitioned OS disks. (Operating system disks must use MBR-partitioned volumes.)

Operating System Requirements

For information about supported virtual machine operating systems, see Importing a VM as an Image Using VM Import/Export.
The Commvault software supports the following operating systems for restoring VMware or Azure backups to Amazon instances:
- Windows 2012 R2
- Windows 2016
- Windows 2019
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6
- CentOS-based 7.5
For information about Amazon's supported virtual machine operating systems, on the "VM Import/Export Requirements" page in AWS documentation, see Operating Systems.

Procedure

From the navigation pane, go to Protect > Virtualization.

The Virtual machines page appears.
On the Hypervisors tab, click the hypervisor.

The hypervisor page appears.
Click the VM groups tab, in the row for the VM group, under Actions, click the action button, and then click Restore.

The Select restore type page appears.
To restore one or more full virtual machines, select Full virtual machine.

The Restore page appears.
Under Name, beside each object that you want to restore, click the check box, and then at the top-left of the page, click Restore.

To browse within an item, you can select an item or click on an entry in the Name column.

In the top right corner of the page, a "Showing" message indicates what backup data is being displayed. You can click the down arrow beside this message and select any of the following options:
- Show latest backups: Only display data for the most recent backups.
- Show backups as of a specific date: Only display data up to the date you specify.
- Show backups for a date range: Only display data within the data range you specify.
The Restore options dialog box appears.
Enter the restore options for the Amazon instance.
Click Submit to run the restore job.

Result

After VM conversion, if a source VM had dynamic disks that use spanned or striped volumes, the volumes in the converted VM might be marked as Failed in Disk Management. You must bring these disks online manually using Disk Management. To bring the disks back online, perform an Import Foreign Disks operation on the guest VM for the disk group that contains failed disks. Import the entire disk group in one operation rather than performing a partial import.

This consideration also applies to GPT-partitioned OS disks. (Operating system disks must use MBR-partitioned volumes.)
After you perform VM conversion or replication operations to Amazon EC2 using the HotAdd method, a Windows instance restarts when a user logs on to the instance for the first time. The restart is required to initialize drivers that are added to the instances during the operation.