Notes on restoring virtual machines into vCloud Director
To restore a virtual machine into vCloud Director, note the following:
The Backup, Archive, and Restore interface allows the restore of one virtual machine at a time.
You can use the nbrestorevm command to restore multiple virtual machines.
See Using the nbrestorevm command to restore virtual machines into vCloud Director.
When you back up a virtual machine in vCloud Director, it is recommended the setting for Primary VM identifier on the VMware tab. Use of the setting is not recommended.
To restore a virtual machine into vCloud Director, the virtual machine must have been in vCloud Director when it was backed up.
To restore a virtual machine into vCloud Director, the backup policy must have been configured as described in the following topic:
For vCloud Director restores, you can use the following configuration setting to have NetBackup automatically delete the VM left at the vCenter on import failure:
DELETE_VM_ON_IMPORT_FAILURE = 1
Enter this setting in
bp.confor the registry on the primary server.When a vApp is restored, vCloud Director resets the vApp's expiration date. For example: Assume the original vApp was created on the first day of the month and was set to expire in 30 days. If the vApp is restored 15 days before its expiration (on the 15th), vCloud resets the vApp to expire in 30 days from the 15th.
The VM administrator can reset the expiration date to its original date.
You cannot restore a virtual machine into an existing vApp template. VMware sets this restriction.
After you restore a vApp template, the template cannot be changed and no further virtual machines can be added to it (a VMware restriction). To restore a vApp template that is to contain multiple VMs, you must restore all but one of the VMs separately into a non-template vApp. Then restore the last virtual machine by means of the option.
See “Restoring a vApp template that has multiple virtual machines”.
You can restore the vCloud Director virtual machine into vSphere instead of vCloud Director. On the Recovery Destination screen, select
vCloud organization networks are not displayed on the Network Connections screen for restore; only vSphere networks are displayed.
For a restore of a vCloud Director virtual machine that resides in a vApp with special characters in its name, the VM may not show up when using the Browse Virtual Machines selection method. In that case, the VM can be found using the Search Virtual Machines selection method.
To restore into an existing vCloud Director vApp with the option, the vApp must be turned off.
vCloud backup images cannot be restored by means of the NetBackup vSphere Web Client plug-in or the NetBackup vSphere Client (HTML5) plug-in. This type of restore can be performed by means of the Backup, Archive, and Restore interface.
vSphere 5 provides storage profiles for managing the datastores on which virtual machines are created. When you restore into vCloud, the NetBackup restore interface lets you select a target datastore but not a storage profile. If the target datastore does not comply with the storage profile or if the datastore you select has been disabled, note: NetBackup automatically migrates the virtual machine to a compliant datastore if possible when you import to vCloud Director.
Note:
At the end of a successful restore, NetBackup verifies that the virtual machine is on compliant storage (on a datastore with the defined storage profile).
To ensure that any VM guest customizations are restored into vCloud Director, you must set a NetBackup parameter. The parameter value specifies a wait period in seconds so that the guest customizations can be restored successfully. (The VMware API requires that the VMware Tools are installed and running, but the state of the VMware Tools cannot be identified after the restore. Therefore, we wait the specified amount of time so that the VMware Tools are running in the initial restore environment.)
See Ensuring that guest customizations can be restored in vCloud Director.