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 Cloud Protection 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:

   • VMs, continue with the Recover Objects & Volumes procedure in Recover Protected Objects & Files.

   • Files and folders, continue with the Recover Files & Folders procedure in Recover Protected Objects & Files.

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 Cloud Protection Service begins to restore the selected VMs or files to the selected location.

If a VM has been deleted from the source, check the Activity page to identify the desired snapshot, and then initiate the recovery from that snapshot.

Accelerate VM Recoveries with Differential Restore

In Cohesity Cloud Protection 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

General

VMs from an on-premises source can be recovered to AVS and VMC sources and vice versa.

Cross-recovery operations may fail due to potential incompatibilities between the source and destination environments.

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.

Automatic Deployment of Cohesity Agent

The Auto Deploy Cohesity Agent provides an alternative recovery method that supports broader recovery scenarios and improved performance.

Prerequisites

• Port 50051 of the target VM must be reachable from SaaS connector(s) for establishing the agent communication.

• If the SaaS connector grouping is configured, then all of the SaaS connectors in the SaaS connector grouping must be reachable from a target VM.

• VMware tools must be installed on the target VM to push and start the Cohesity Agent.

Considerations

When recovering files and folders from protected VMware VM instances:

• Recovery of Windows symlinks is not supported.

• Recovery of files and folders from a combination of different volumes is not supported.

• Recovery of Windows 2KR2 is not supported.

• FLR from a windows deduplicated volume is not supported.

Recover VMware VM Files and Folders

To recover VMware VMs or files and folders from your protected VMware VM instances:

1. In Cloud Protection Service, navigate to Sources.

2. Click the Source name.

3. Select Protection Status > Protected.

4. Click the required VMware File backed up as a Cohesity Snapshot and click the Recover Files icon for the VMware. The page with the VMware details is displayed.

5. Select the timeline drop-down list on the top right corner to select the snapshot and click Apply.

6. Select the file and click Next.
   The Files page is displayed.

7. Under Recover To, select Original Server or New Server.

8. To recover to a different location in the original server, disable the Recover to Original Path option, and then provide the location to which the files or folders are to be recovered in the Recover To field.

   For the new server, you can also change the default location to which the files or folders are recovered. From the Target (for VM and physical server) drop-down menu, select a VM to which the files and files are to be recovered.

9. Select the following Restore Method option and provide the required information:

   • Auto Deploy Cohesity Agent: Select this option and provide the username and password of the target VM to automatically deploy the Cohesity Agent on the target VM.
     This allows you to use local or domain credentials to access the target VM.
     For Windows VMs, the following considerations are applicable:

     • If you use local user credentials, that user must be a local administrator on the server.

     • If you use domain user credentials, ensure that the username is entered in the format <domain/username>. The user must either be a domain administrator or a member of the Domain Administrators group on the server. Additionally, make sure that User Account Control (UAC) is disabled for the user.

     For Linux VMs, the following considerations are applicable:

     • If the user being used is a non-root user, the user must have sudo access.
       For non-root users, ensure that the following entries are added in the /etc/sudoers file:
       <username> ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
Defaults:<username> !requiretty

     • The recovery directory path length must be less than 4096 characters.

     • Ensure that sufficient free space is available in /tmp for Cohesity to push the Linux agent binaries.

     • The Cohesity Linux Agent has dependencies on the packages, which must be installed on the Linux server.

   • VMware Tools–based File Level Recovery: Cohesity also supports file level recovery for VMware VMs using VMware Tools. This recovery method relies on VMware Tools running on the target VM to copy files to the destination.

   Cohesity Cloud Protection Service opens the Activity page, showing your file recovery task as it runs, along with the recovery progress on the right.

   The Activity page also shows the entire history of all protection runs and recovery tasks, including any that are in progress.

10. Select your Recovery Options:

    • Overwrite Existing File/Folder: Enable this option to overwrite the existing files and folders. Disable this option to create the files and folders in the specified location. If a file with the same name already exists in the target location, the file is overwritten or skipped based on this selection.
      If Overwrite Existing File/Folder is enabled, recovering a file to source when the file is in use may cause the open file to be overwritten. Whether overwriting occurs depends on the application using the file.

    • Preserve File/Folder Attributes: By default, this option is enabled and the ACLs, permissions, and timestamps are preserved for all files and folders. If you disable this option, then ACLs and permissions are not preserved. If both folders and files are recovered, then folders will receive the new timestamps, but files retain their original timestamps. If recovering only files, then files will receive the new timestamps.

    • Continue on Error: Enable this option if you want to continue the recovery even if one of the objects encounters an error. By default, this option is disabled and the recovery operation will fail if one of the objects encounters an error.

    • Task Name: Change the default name of the recovery task.

11. Click Recover.

    Cohesity Cloud Protection Service begins to restore the selected VMware files and folders.