Full VM Restore for ZStack

Create Full VM Restore Job

To restore one or a group of Zstack VMs, please go to Data Resilience > Restore > Virtualization > Restore page to create a full VM restore job. Please follow the below steps to create the job.

Step 1. Select Restore Point(s)

In the Restore Point dropdown list, select a backup node which stores the desired restore points.

Select a target VM restore point under the 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.

Notice

You can only select restore points from the same virtual platform into a same job, if you have restore points from multiple virtual platforms, please create multiple full restore jobs separately.

Step 2. Select Restore Destination

In the Target Host dropdown list, you can select a target host on which you'd like to restore.

After selecting ZStack host, Unified Configurations and VM Configurations will appear.

Unified Configurations: If you are restoring a group of VMs, enable this function you can set the storage, network, and choose whether to power on the target VMs after restoring.

VM Configurations: Here you can setup advanced restore options for specific VM(s) by clicking on the VM name, modifying the configurations 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 status after restoring.

CPU: Here you are allowed to change the number of CPUs or CPU cores for the VM to be restored if necessary.

RAM: Here you are allowed to change the RAM size of the VM to be restored if necessary.

Virtual Disk: Virtual Disk settings are optional, you can proceed with the given default settings.

In the Virtual Disk column, there are checkboxes for the VM virtual disks, when a VM has multiple disks, you can choose to restore specific disk(s) without having to restore all the disks 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 disk.

By clicking on Advanced, you can find virtual disk Interface which the value is Classic Volume(Recommended) or VirtIO Disk.

Virtual Network: Virtual Network settings are also optional. It allows 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 and NIC's Type for

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.

By default, the virtual platform will choose NIC type as e1000(Recommended), but you can also choose VirtIO or rtl8139 if you prefer.

Other Settings: Data Encryption: 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 for verification under Other Settings tab, otherwise without the data encryption password, the VM cannot be restored

After selecting the target host and configuring the restored VM, please click on Next to continue.

Step 3. Configure Backup Strategies

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 Transmission Strategy of a VM restore job, users can choose LAN or SAN (LAN-free) . For more detailed explanation of the transmission strategy, please refer to Data Transmission. Users can configure multithreaded transmission for the VM restore job, and it also works the same principle as for the VM backup jobs.

For Security Strategy, different virus scan strategies based on the status of each backup point.If users has not scanned the backup point, they can perform a scan on the backup point and set scan strategy, or they can directly restore it. Handling Integrity Check Anomalies: options include interrupt recovery, continue recovery, or recovery to an offline environment mode.

For Advanced Strategy, You can set a retry strategy, if an operation excepetion occurs during job execution, it will re-execute according to the configured retry strategy. For tasks with high priority, you can set Ignore Node Resource Limits to ensure the operation. For Overload Protection, ignore node resource limits means for tasks with higher priority, enabling this setting allows you to bypass node resource constraints.

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.