Reactivating a restored virtual machine with Instant Recovery for VMware
If an interruption occurs during an instant recovery (such as a restart of the host or media server), the ESX connection to the media server may fail. In that case, it may be possible to re-establish the connection and return the virtual machine to the state it was in before the outage. Any transactions that occurred in the virtual machine before the outage are retained.
To reactivate a restored virtual machine
- If only one VM had been restored to the ESX host, enter the following:
nbrestorevm - ir_listvm
Find the VM Instant Recovery ID for the restored VM in the -ir_listvm output. Then enter the following:
nbrestorevm - ir_reactivate Instant Recovery ID [-force]
where instant recovery ID is the virtual machine's numeric identifier from the -ir_listvm output. -force is an optional parameter to suppress confirmation prompts.
The ir_reactivate option remounts the NetBackup NFS datastore. From the temporary datastore on the ESX host it registers the restored virtual machines on the ESX host.
- If more than one VM had been restored to the ESX host:
nbrestorevm - ir_reactivate_all -vmhost vm_host - media_server media_server [-force]
Note: For multiple virtual machines, do not use the - ir_reactivate option. Use - ir_reactivate_all.
The -vmhost option specifies the ESX host on which the virtual machines were mounted. The -media_server option specifies the media server on which the NFS datastores that contain the backup images were mounted. -force is an optional parameter to suppress confirmation prompts.
The nbrestorevm -ir_reactivate_all command remounts the NetBackup NFS datastores on the media server and reactivates the virtual machines.
- When the virtual machine is reactivated, you can copy its files or migrate its data to the ESX host.
- If Storage vMotion was migrating the virtual machine files when the outage occurred, restart the migration.
In vSphere Client, right-click on the restored virtual machine and select Migrate.