Agentless Restores for Nutanix AHV

You can use agentless restores to restore small files and folders into a virtual machine (VM) without installing an agent on the destination server. Agentless restores simplify deployment and reduce the impact of backup and restore operations for virtual machines that do not have high transaction rates and large data requirements.

Prerequisites

Note the following requirements for agentless restores:

• For Windows:

  • The virtual machine must have the NTFS file system.

  • The virtual machine must run Windows 2012 R2, or Windows 10 and higher.

• The destination server must meet the following prerequisites:

  • To verify the version of Nutanix AHV software that is required to support this feature, see System Requirements for Nutanix AHV.

  • The destination VM must be powered on.

• The user account that is used to browse the destination VM must be a local user with write permissions for the VM.

• 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.

Considerations

• A proxy cannot make two or more simultaneous parallel connections to the same VM. The restore to the VM for the job that establishes the first connection succeeds, but because an active connection exists between the proxy and the VM, subsequent jobs fail with a connection error because there is already an active connection between the proxy and the VM.

• In environments that contain both Windows VMs and Linux VMs, to perform agentless restores, Commvault recommends using a Windows access node when you configure a hypervisor. To use a Linux access node to restore files to a Windows destination VM, install the SSH server on the destination VM.

• For Linux destination VMs, you can use only password-based authentication.

• The following protocols are used for data transfer:

  Access node (proxy) OS	Destination VM OS	Protocol used and prerequisites
  Windows	Windows	PowerShell (remote), SMB
  Windows	Linux	SSH
  Linux	Windows	SSH - the destination server must have the SSH server installed and running
  Linux	Linux	SSH

  The following ports must be open:

• For Windows:

  • When you select a destination VM that doesn't have an agent installed, ACLs and data option will be not shown.

  • You cannot use an agentless restore operation to recover reparse points (such as such as shared folders, mount points, or junction points) on Windows NTFS volumes.

  • Allow communication for the following applications through the Windows Firewall:

    • NetLogon

    • File and Print Sharing

• For Linux:

  • When you select a destination VM that doesn't have an agent installed, ACLs and data option will be not shown.

  • Permissions for guest files and folders are retained only when the user running the restore operation has permissions to change group ownership on the restored files and folders. If the user does not have change group ownership permissions, the restored files and folders are owned by the user who performed the restore.

  • You cannot restore an empty folder unless you restore the parent folder; when you restore a parent folder all other folders contained in the parent folder are also restored.

  • Symbolic links can be restored if the source files are also restored, but they will use the timestamp of the restore operation instead of the original timestamp. If the source files are not restored, symbolic link files are restored but without links; as a result the linked data cannot be read.

  • Hard link files can be restored; if source files are also restored any corresponding link files use the same index node (inode).