Recover VMware VMs & Files

After you protect your VMware sources, you can recover VMs and files from your backups, to their original or a new location.

Recover VMware VMs or Files

To recover VMware VMs or files:

  1. In DataProtect as a Service, go to Sources to set up your recovery task.

  2. Click on the Source name.

  3. Above the tree, select Protection Status > Protected.

  4. Use the filters, search box, and views to locate the objects or files you need.

  5. To recover:

  6. Select your Recovery Options and click Start Recovery.

    If you are recovering a VM to the original location and enable Overwrite Existing VM, you can choose to take advantage of Attempt Differential Recovery to shorten your recovery time, after considering the implications below.

Cohesity DataProtect as a Service begins to restore the selected VMs or files to the selected location.

Accelerate VM Recoveries with Differential Restore

In Cohesity DataProtect as a Service, you can recover the VM by overwriting only the difference between the original VM and the snapshot selected for recovery. This option is available only if you have selected to recover to the original location and enabled Overwrite Existing VM in the VM recovery options in your recovery task.

Differential recovery substantially reduces the amount of data transfer in a recovery process. In the task activity log (under Activity), you can view the amount of data transfer saved by selecting differential recovery.

However, there are several important implications to consider before choosing to Attempt Differential Recovery:

  • Any newly added data in the original VM is deleted.

  • The recovered VM will have the existing VM name.

  • You can choose this option if there are no hardware configuration changes involved in the original VM.

  • If you want to reclaim free space for thin-provisioned disks, then Cohesity recommends not to attempt differential recovery and only perform Overwrite Existing VM recovery.

  • If the original VM is not present or if the attempt at differential recovery fails, then Cohesity will perform an Overwrite Existing VM recovery.

  • In the original VM, if there are any newly added disks or any disks that were excluded during backup, then the recovered VM will not have these newly added disks, nor any disks excluded during backup.

  • All the snapshots present on the original VM are consolidated and removed as part of differential recovery.

Considerations

NVRAM files

  • If you are protecting a VM equipped with vTPM, enable the Cryptographer.ManageKeyServers privilege in the vCenter for the user account registered with Cohesity.

  • If you are recovering a VM equipped with vTPM using a different KMS or replacing the current KMS with a new one, the vTPM VMs may not start after the recovery process, even if the new KMS has the same name.

  • The supported maximum size of the NVRAM file is 10 MB. Contact your Cohesity account team if your NVRAM files are larger than 10 MB.

  • Restoring the NVRAM file from the encrypted VMs is not supported, except for vTPM encryption.

DataSets files

  • The maximum size of a DataSets file can be up to 300 MB. In most cases, the DataSets file size will be a few MBs. Contact your Cohesity account team if the files exceed 300 MB.

  • Restoring the DataSets file from the encrypted VMs is not supported, except for vTPM encryption.

VMware Tools

  • A VMware Tools service restart during a Recovery operation may disrupt Recovery. If the VMware Tools service restarts during a Recovery operation, the following error message is returned: The guest operations agent could not be contacted. After multiple retries to contact the guest operations agent, an error message stating that it started the copy but it could not get the status is returned. Go to the recovery location to verify whether the operation succeeded.

  • The maximum recovery speed is 1-2 Mbps due to a known VMware limitation. For more details, see the VMware article.
  • Ensure port 443 is open on the ESXi host that hosts the target VM. For more details, see Firewall Ports for User-Deployed SaaS Connectors.
  • Cohesity recommends that you not use VMware Tools if the size of the recovered files or folders exceeds 10 GB or 10,000 files.

  • For Windows VMs:

    • ACLs cannot be restored even if you have enabled the Preserve File/Folder Attributes option. Only the VM data will be restored.

    • Recovery of reparse points (such as shared folders, mount points, or junction points) cannot be restored.

    • When using the VMware Tools option for FLR on Windows VMs, some ACLs cannot be recovered due to limitations in the VMware API.

  • For Linux VMs:

    • The Preserve File/Folder Attributes option restores only basic user, group, world permissions, and timestamps. Advanced permissions and file attributes such as ACLs are not restored.

    • Permissions for guest files and folders are retained only when the user running the restore operation has permission to change the group ownership on the restored files and folders. If the user does not have change group ownership permissions, the restore operation will fail. In this case, retry the operation without enabling the Preserve File/Folder Attributes option.

    • VMware APIs do not support the creation of files in the root folder.

    • VMware APIs cannot restore symbolic links.

    • Restoring files to a folder is not supported if the user account doesn't have write permission to that folder (even if the user has sudo permissions). Cohesity recommends using a root user or a user account with write privileges to the target folder.

    • If you restore files and folders using a guest user account that does not have permission to change file/folder ownership, the restored files are owned by the guest user account used to perform the restore. If you restore files and folders using a guest user account that has permission to change file/folder ownership, the restored files are owned by (or the ownership is retained by) the guest user account used to create the files and folders.

    • When a parent folder is restored all of its sub folders are restored also; Empty folders can be restored only when the parent folder is restored.

    • Restoring hard links is supported; hard links restored with their source files use the same index node (inode).

    • If a Windows VM includes volumes created from a storage pool (Microsoft Storage spaces), FLR is not supported.