Things to consider before you use the instant access feature
Note the following about the Instant access virtual machines feature:
This feature is supported with backup copies that are created from protection plans using the web UI or from classic policies that are created with the NetBackup Administration Console.
This feature supports only the policy type in NetBackup. For the policy types that the web UI protection plans use, contact the backup administrator.
This feature is supported only for NetBackup appliances.
This feature is limited to 50 concurrent mount points on a Media Server Deduplication Pool (MSDP) media server.
By default, vSphere allows a maximum of eight NFS mounts per ESXi server. Note that NetBackup requires an NFS mount for each instant access VM you create. To remove the NFS mount, remove the instant access VM when you are done with it.
If the NFS limit for an ESXi host has been reached and you try to create another instant access VM, the attempt fails. To increase the maximum NFS mounts per ESXi server, see the following VMware article:
This feature does not support backups of VMs that have independent disks. VMware does not support snapshots of independent disks in a VM, either persistent disks or non-persistent disks. As a result, independent disks are not backed up.
For more information on independent disks and NetBackup, see the following article:
This feature does not support VMs that have disks that were excluded from the backup. In the NetBackup Administration Console, on the NetBackup policy's Exclude Disks tab, select . Or, in the NetBackup Web UI, in the protection plan, clear the check box.
This feature does not support VMs that have a disk in raw device mapping mode (RDM) or that have a disk in Persistent mode.
For Windows single file restore, the ReFS file system is not supported.
The version of the ESXi server that is used to create a VM using Instant access virtual machines must be equal to or newer than the version of the ESXi server that contains the VM backup images.
For single-file download with the option, the NetBackup web UI must be able to access the media server with the same name or IP address that the master server uses to connect to that media server. See Error encountered when downloading files from an instant access VM.
If the media server appliance uses a third-party certificate, you need to create certain configurations on the NetBackup master server before you use this feature.
For more information, refer to the "Third-party certificates" and "Implementing third-party SSL certificates" sections in the NetBackup Appliance Security Guide, available here:
This feature does not support restore of multiple files or folders, which are located in different volumes, partitions, or disks.
Use the Windows administrator account credentials when you restore multiple files or folders to a Windows VM.
Some ACL entries are not in the restored file because ACL entries for these users or groups cannot be restored. For example, TrustedInstallers, All Application Packages.
The Instant Access feature does not support a Windows 10 compact operating system. To verify if your operating system is compressed, run compact "/compactos:query" on the command prompt before backing up your VM.
To disable the compression, run "compact /compactos:never" on the command prompt before backing up your VM. You can then use the Instant Access feature for your VM backups.
To restore files and folders, the target VM must be in a normal state, and not in a sleep or hibernate mode.
A 5-minutes-alive-session threshold is defined in Appliance web server NGINX. The files and folders that are selected for download must be compressed and downloaded within this threshold.
To create an instant access virtual machine, you must have read and write access to the VMware data center where the virtual machine will be created.
You have a backup image that has several copies, all of which have instant access capability. During replication, to retain the instant access capability, you must only select the first copy for replication. For example, if your backup image is image 1 and you have four copies, copy A, copy B, copy C, and copy D. For replication you must only use copy A to retain the instant access capability.