Restoring a Full Virtual Machine In Place for VMware

You can restore virtual machines in place, to their original location. By default, virtual machines are restored to the original location, using the same access node as the backup operation.

When you initiate a restore operation for a specific VM from the VM groups page or from the Virtual machines page, you can choose to restore the full VM, to use live recovery, or to perform a live mount operation.

If the hypervisor is configured to support vCloud Director, you can restore a virtual machine to vCloud.

Before You Begin

If a passkey is configured for restores, you must have the passkey.
Ensure that you are using a supported version of VMware vCenter Server. For more information, see "VMware vCenter Server Support" in System Requirements for Virtual Server Agent with VMware.
VMware licensing must include a license for vMotion operations.
The ESX server that is used to mount the NFS datastore for browse and restore operations must be able to resolve the MediaAgent (which uses 3DFS components to perform the live recovery). To ensure connectivity, create a host file entry for the MediaAgent on the ESX server.
The vCenter user account must have permissions set as described in Permissions for Custom User Accounts.
If you want to restore data using a specific MediaAgent and/or copy, review the information in MediaAgent and Copy Precedence Considerations for Virtualization Restores.

Procedure

From the navigation pane, go to Protect > Virtualization.

The Virtual machines page appears.
Click the VM groups tab.

The VM group page appears.
On the VM groups tab, in the row for the VM group, click the action button , and then click Restore.

The Select restore type page appears.
Select Full virtual machine to restore one or more full virtual machines.

The Restore Options page appears.
To choose a different MediaAgent or source copy for the restore, do the following:
1. In the upper-right corner of the page, click Settings.
  
  The Settings dialog box appears.
2. For MediaAgent, decide whether to have the Commvault software automatically select the MediaAgent or to specify a MediaAgent:
  - Automatic: By default, the Commvault software selects the MediaAgent for the restore operation based on availability and environment.
  - To restore data using a specific MediaAgent, from the list, select a MediaAgent.
3. For Source, decide whether to have the Commvault software automatically select the copy of backup data or to specify the copy:
  - Automatic: By default, the restore operation searches for the requested data in the primary copy and selects a different copy if the data is not found in the primary copy.
  - To restore from a specific copy of backup data, from the list, select a backup copy.
4. Click Save.
Select the content that you want to restore, and then click Restore.

The Restore options dialog box appears.
For Type, select In place.
From the Access node list, select the access node or the access node group to use for the restore.

If you are restoring multiple VMs, select Automatic to distribute the VMs in the restore job across the access nodes that are assigned for the VMware destination hypervisor.

VMs are assigned to access nodes using the round-robin method.

The Automatic option is available for full VM restores from streaming backups or IntelliSnap backup copies.

If you select an access node group to restore VMs, the Commvault software distributes the workload (instances or VMs) in the restore job across the access nodes (also called proxies) that are available in the access node group.
To automatically start the restored VM, move the Power on VMs after restore toggle key to the right.
To delete an existing VM with the same name and replace it with the restored VM, move the Unconditionally overwrite if it already exists toggle key to the right.
Under Additional options, specify the following:
- For Disk provisioning, do the following:
  - To retain the provisioning method that was used at the time of backup, select Original.
  - To specify a different disk provisioning method, select Thick Lazy Zero, Thin, or Thick Eager Zero.
- For Transport mode, do the following:
  - To have the Commvault software automatically select the best transport mode for the environment, select Auto.
  - To specify a specific transport mode, select the transport mode.
Click Submit.