Prepare source VMs for recovery to an Azure cleanroom site

In certain cases, you must prepare source VMs before recovering them to an Azure cleanroom site. These preparations help ensure that recovered systems function correctly and support post-recovery validation.

For VMs that host databases or other applications, cleanroom recovery can restore the VM and then restore the application data to a specific point in time. Make sure that application-aware backups are configured so that this recovery workflow is supported.

VMs that host Active Directory

Enable automatic health checks

Automatic health checks validate that recovered domain controllers are fully functional. To enable these validations, install the Active Directory package.

From the Command Center navigation pane, go to Manage > Servers.
In the row for the VM/instance, click the action button , select Maintenance, and then select Add software.
From the Select packages list, select Active Directory, and then click OK.
Click Install.

Enable recovery of individual files

To recover individual files from VMs, you must have file system backups. To enable file-level protection and recovery, install the Commvault File System package.

From the Command Center navigation pane, go to Manage > Servers.
In the row for the VM/instance, click the action button , select Maintenance, and then select Add software.
From the Select packages list, select File System, and then click OK.
Click Install.

Prepare Nutanix AHV instances with a firewall

For Nutanix AHV instances that have a firewall enabled, disable the firewall before running the backup that you will use for recovery.

VMs that host databases or applications

Application-aware backups are needed

For VMs that host databases or applications, make sure that application-aware backups are configured so the database or application can be restored to the required point in time during cleanroom recovery.

Back up only selected VM disks

For some cleanroom recovery workflows, you might want the VM backup to include only selected disks (for example, only the OS disk) and to rely on the application/database restore workflow to provision the remaining data disks/volumes.

To do this, configure disk filters on the source VM in the content settings for the VM group so that the VM backup includes only the disks that match the filter.

Verify which disks are included

To confirm which disks are included in the VM backup, review the disk list from a VM restore workflow (for example, using an Attach disk to VM-type restore option), and confirm that only the intended disks appear.

Less common use cases

Hyper-V differencing disks

If Hyper-V VMs use differencing disks (AVHD or AVHDX files), merge the disks with the base disk before recovery.

For instructions, see How to merge checkpoints that have multiple differencing disks in the Microsoft documentation.

Epic EHR databases

If a file system that hosts an Epic EHR (InterSystems IRIS Caché) database is directly on a disk, identify the correct disk and update the fstab file to reference the restored disk.
For information about recovering an Epic EHR database to a Linux VM in an Azure cleanroom site, see Prepare a Red Hat-based virtual machine for Azure.