Citrix Hypervisor Full VM Restore
To restore one or a group of Cirtix Hypervisor(Xenserver) VMs, please go to VM Backup > Restore > Full Restore page to create a full VM restore job. Please follow the below steps to create the job.
Step 1. Select Restore Point
In the Restore Point dropdown list, select a backup node which stores the desired restore points.
Select a target VM restore point under the Citrix Hypervisor(Xenserver) virtual platform which you want to restore. You can quickly find the target restore point by searching the job name, VM name or the date of the restore point in the search box.
You can restore a group of VMs by selecting one of the restore points under each of the VMs. After selecting the desired restore point under virtual machine which you want to recover, click Next to continue.
Step 2. Select Restore Destination
In the Target Host list, select a target Xenserver host on which you wish to run the restored VMs. After selecting the target host, Vinchin Backup & Recovery will request resources information from the host, the whole process will take a few seconds.
When done selecting the restore destination, users can directly click on Next to continue, as the other settings in this step are optional. Vinchin Backup & Recovery will automatically configure the VM with the original (default) and recommended settings. But if needed, users can customized the VM settings, like number of vCPUs, size of RAM, target datastore, target virtual network, etc.
Unified Configurations: If you are restoring a group of VMs, enable this option you can set the VMs to be restored to a unified datastore and virtual network, and also can set the unified power state of the VMs to be restored.
VM Configurations: Here you can setup advanced restore options for specific VM(s) by clicking on the VM name, modifying the settings of one VM will not affect the unified configurations of the other VMs if you had enabled Unified Configurations option.
Name & Status: You can set a customized name for the VM to be restored and set its power state after restoring. By default, the restored VM name will be original VM name with a suffix of the time when the backup was created, as for power state, the restored VMs will be in powered off state.
CPU and RAM: Here you are allowed to change the number of vCPUs or CPU cores and the RAM size for the VM to be restored if necessary.
Virtual Disk: In the Disk(s) column, there are checkboxes for the VM virtual disks, when a VM has multiple disks, you can choose to restore specific disk(s) of the VM. But if you don’t restore the disk on which the operating system is installed, the restored VM will not be bootable, you need to re-install a new operating system or mount the restored disk to another VM to be able to access this virtual disk. In Restore To column, you can select datastore to which the virtual disk will be restored. By default, Vinchin will automatically select a datastore to restore the VM virtual disks. By clicking on Advanced, you can setup the disk provisioning options. But the virtual disk interface type cannot be configured, it should be kept as original interface type.
Virtual Network: Virtual network settings allow you to select the virtual network to be connected to and the MAC address assignment of the restored VM. In the Connect to column, you can select a desired virtual network for specific virtual network interface of the VM, by default it will automatically select one from the available virtual networks. By clicking on Advanced, you can setup the MAC address assignment for the virtual network interface. By default, the virtual platform will auto generate a new MAC address for the VM, but you can also use the original MAC address or customize the VM MAC address if you prefer.
Other Settings: If the VM backup data is encrypted (Data Encryption enabled in backup job), when restoring the VM you need to provide the data encryption password in the Encryption password field for verification, otherwise without the data encryption password, the VM cannot be restored. If the backup data has not been encrypted, the Encryption password option will not be shown.
Step 3. Configure Restore Strategy
For the job schedule, you can configure the VM restore job as once-off restore or restore as scheduled.
If you choose Once-off Restore, the restore job will start running right after the job has been created. If you choose Restore As Scheduled, you need to set restore schedules. After this, the job will run as scheduled.
Notice
A "once-off" restore job will run only once and will only restore the selected VM(s) for one time, after that the job will be moved into history job list as a history record. But a "restore as scheduled" restore job will run and restore the selected VM(s) regularly according to the time schedules, so, users should be aware of that, a "restore as scheduled" job could cause IP and MAC address conflict in your production environments and could generate a lot of duplicated data!
For Throttling Policy and Advanced Strategy, these settings are optional, throttling policy works the same principle as for VM backup jobs, for advanced strategy, users can configure multithreaded transmission for the VM restore job, and it also works the same principle as for the VM backup jobs.
For Transmission Strategy of a Citrix Hypervisior(Xenserver) VM restore job, users can choose LAN or SAN (LAN-free), if you enable the Encrypted Transmission, VM data will be transferred using the TCP/IP connection between the source virtual platform and the target backup storage. Also you can set the Transmission Network if you have a seperate network. For more detailed explanation of the transmission strategy, please refer to Data Transmission.
Step 4. Review and Confirm Job Settings
After finishing the above settings, you are able to review and confirm all settings here. Click on Submit to confirm creating this job. When the job is created, you will be redirected to the Monitor Center > Jobs page. If this VM restore job is configured as Once-off Restore, it will start restoring the VM(s) right after the creation of this job.