Instant Recovery of Hyper-V 2016 VMs with Backup Exec 16.
Instant Recovery of Hyper-V 2016 VMs with Backup Exec 16.
What is Instant Recovery?
Instant Recovery (IR) is a rapid recovery technique that starts the virtual machine directly from the backup set located on Backup Exec storage. This saves the time required to copy the data over the network to the hypervisor host.
How does this feature work?
- A virtualized copy of the backup(s) is made available to the virtualization host via an SMB (Hyper-V) share.
- The virtualization host creates a VM from the backup copy.
- To handle the writes to the instantly recovered VM, a snapshot is taken for the newly created VM.
- Reads of existing data happen from the virtualized copy on the Backup Exec server.
- The backup set and related dependencies are marked as retained to prevent Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) grooming.
- User can optionally choose to migrate the instantly recovered virtual machine Backup Exec server storage to faster storage that is directly attached to the Hyper-V host.
Question: I have a Windows 2016 Server in my network with the Hyper-V role enabled and hosting some Windows server virtual machines.
Can I leverage the Backup Exec’s Instant Recovery capabilities for these virtual machines?
Answer: Yes. You can use the Instant Recovery feature for the virtual machines hosted on Windows 2016 Server. All the IR functionalities work for VMs hosted on the Windows 2016 Server.
Question: Can a VM running Windows 2016 Server operating system be used for IR?
Answer: Yes, a VM running Windows 2016 Server can be used for IR.
What are the requirements for Instant Recovery?
- ‘Agent for VMware and Hyper-V’ option installed on Backup Exec Server.
- Capacity Edition, Capacity Edition Lite and VRay Edition licenses have this option included.
- Backups using the Agent for VMware and Hyper-V (VM selected from the virtualization host)
- Backups must have File-Folder GRT enabled
- Backup sets must be stored on a disk device
- Deduplication, OST, disk cartridge, USB, cloud, VTL and tape storage is not supported in Instant Recovery.
- Backup sets duplicated from a non-supported source to a disk device are supported for Instant Recovery.
Question: Are there any additional settings on Backup Exec Server/ 2016 Hyper-V required for this feature?
Answer: No additional settings are required.
Question: What new features of Hyper-V 2016 are supported for Instant Recovery?
Answer:
All Windows features supported in Backup Exec 15 Feature Pack 5 are also supported in Backup Exec 16. Virtual machines with new Hyper-V configuration file format are supported for instant recovery.
References
For more details on Instant Recovery feature, refer to the following link:
Following is a link for a quick demo on Instant Recovery:
Demo- Instant Recovery for Hyper-V virtual machine