With Live Mount, you can run a virtual machine directly from a stored backup for that VM.
You can use this feature to validate that backups are usable for disaster recovery, to validate the content on the backup, or to access data from the virtual machine directly instead of restoring guest files.
Virtual machines that are live mounted are intended for short term use—not for production. Changes to live mounted VMs or their data are not retained when the virtual machine expires. The VM expiration period is specified in the lifecycle policy.
Considerations
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You can perform live mount operations from Hyper-V streaming backups and IntelliSnap backup copies.
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The software uses a 3DFS cache on the MediaAgent to perform the live mount operation. By default, the 3DFS cache is located in the Job Results folder for the VSA (access node). During a Hyper-V live mount operation, the software creates a network share that exists until the unmount operation completes.
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The 3DFS cache folder permissions are used as the access permissions for this network share. If all users have full permissions on the 3DFS cache folder, then everyone can access the network share. To make the network share more secure, specify a different path for the 3DFS cache folder using the s3dfsRootDir additional setting and use an ACL to restrict user access to the network share.