VM Recovery Methods
Vinchin Backup & Recovery provides comprehensive VM recovery options for customers to recover their data assets and services in varies scenarios, in order to meet their data protection and business continuity needs.
Full VM Recovery
Vinchin's full VM recovery allows users to recover full data sets of a single or multiple VMs when needed. The recovery process involving creating a new VM and transferring the backup data from backup storage to production datastore to rebuild a fully functional new VM. So, full VM recovery is suitable for recovery of non-business-critical VMs which are not so sensitive to RTOs.
Users can create a VM recovery job to recover a single or multiple VMs at a time, by default, it will recover the VMs with original configurations, but if needed, users can specify the target host or cluster to recover to, as for the VM configurations, e.g.: number of vCPUs, size of RAM, target virtual network, target datastore, power state, etc. are all configurable.
Instant VM Recovery
Vinchin's instant VM recovery allows users to run a VM directly from its backups, it does not require transferring complete data sets of the VM to production datastore, an NFS datastore will be created upon the selected restore point (and other dependent restore points) from within Vinchin backup repository, and the instant recovery VM will directly boot from the NFS datastore, the whole process can be done within 1 minute. So, instant VM recovery is suitable for recovery of business-critical VMs which are sensitive to RTOs.
Due to the instant restore VM is targeted to support business-critical services from unexpected interruption, it's recommended to schedule a live migration during non-business hours to migrate the instant restore VM data from backup repository to production datastore to continue running the VM in the production environment.
During the runtime of instant restore VM, the cache data will be stored in a dedicated location within the backup repository, and the original backup data will remain unmodified. The live migration process is performed upon the instant restore job, the whole process will migrate both the original backup data and also the cache data to the production datastore in a data consistent manner. So, users don't have to worry about the data consistency problem through out the whole process of instant restore and migration.
Granular VM Recovery
Granular VM recovery is suitable for file-level restore of specific files directly from the VM backup data without restoring the entire VM to the production environment.
Vinchin's granular VM recovery is totally independent from the virtual platform, when running a granular restore job, Vinchin Backup & Recovery will process the selected restore point (and other dependent restore points) internally and then present the entire filesystem of the VM within the web console for users to browse and download the required files. The whole process only takes less than 1 minute, it will not involve data transmission from backup repository to production datastore and also will not consume resources of the virtual platform.
V2V Migration
For Vinchin's VM recovery, except recovering the VMs to the original host, another host or another cluster of the same virtualization, it also allows users to recover the VMs to another virtualization, the cross virtualization recovery is also as known as V2V migration.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery enables users to perform V2V migration both with full VM recovery and instant VM recovery. By using full VM recovery to perform V2V migration, users can do batch VM migration from one virtualization to another with unattended automatic process. By using instant VM recovery to perform V2V migration, it allows users to migrate business-critical VMs from one virtualization to another with optimized RTOs in order to minimize business down time.