When restoring a VMware or Azure virtual machine from a backup, you can choose to restore the VM as an Amazon instance.
You can use this feature to migrate virtual machines to the AWS cloud.
If you are using the import method for restores, when you restore a full Amazon EC2, convert a VM to an Amazon EC2 instance, or replicate a VM to Amazon EC2 by using the import method, Metallic automatically creates an Amazon S3 bucket for the destination. The bucket is named gx-restore-region_name-account_id, where region_name is the name of the AWS region and account_id is the AWS account for the hypervisor.
You can perform VM conversions from streaming backups, from secondary copies, or from IntelliSnap backup copies. You cannot perform a conversion from a Snap copy.
Before You Begin
On any VM that you want to import into an Amazon EC2 instance, you need 2 GB of available disk space in the OS disk for installing drivers and other software.
Using the Metallic backup gateway running on an Amazon instance, the restore operation can write directly to Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and inject Amazon drivers that are required for destination instances. You must provide credentials for the guest VM. The restore is performed using the HotAdd method.
You must install Xen drivers on Linux guest VMs before performing a backup of a VM that is used as the source for conversion or replication. Installing Xen drivers on Linux guest VMs enables the required drivers to be in place when the Amazon instances are created, so that the Amazon instance can be started and users can access the instance.
The Metallic backup gateway must be able to connect to ec2.amazonaws.com.
For information about the restore options for the Amazon destination, see Options for Conversion to Amazon.
Considerations
For information about Amazon considerations and limitations, see the following pages:
RAID partitioned volumes are not supported for conversion and import into Amazon.
Import of Linux VMs with GUID Partition Table (GPT) partitioned boot volumes is not supported.
For more information about Amazon's supported volume types and file systems, on the "VM Import/Export Requirements" page in AWS documentation, see Volume types and file systems.
Operating System Requirements
For information about supported virtual machine operating systems, see Importing a VM as an Image Using VM Import/Export.
The Metallic software supports the following Azure VM operating systems for restoring Azure backups to Amazon instances:
Windows 2012 R2
Windows 2016
Windows 2019
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6
CentOS-based 7.5
For information about Amazon's supported virtual machine operating systems, on the "VM Import/Export Requirements" page in AWS documentation, see Operating Systems.
Procedure
From the navigation pane, go to Protect > Virtualization.
The Virtual machines page appears.
Click the VM groups tab.
The VM group page appears.
Click the VM groups tab, in the row for the VM group, under Actions, click the action
button, and then click Restore.The Select restore type page appears.
To restore one or more full virtual machines, select Full virtual machine.
The Restore page appears.
Under Name, beside each object that you want to restore, click the check box, and then at the top-left of the page, click Restore.
To browse within an item, you can select an item or click on an entry in the Name column.
In the top right corner of the page, a "Showing" message indicates what backup data is being displayed. You can click the down arrow beside this message and select any of the following options:
Show latest backups: Only display data for the most recent backups.
Show backups as of a specific date: Only display data up to the date you specify.
Show backups for a date range: Only display data within the data range you specify.
The Restore options dialog box appears.
Enter the restore options for the Amazon instance.
Click Submit to run the restore job.
Result
After VM conversion, if a source VM had dynamic disks that use spanned or striped volumes, the volumes in the converted VM might be marked as Failed in Disk Management. You must bring these disks online manually using Disk Management. To bring the disks back online, perform an Import Foreign Disks operation on the guest VM for the disk group that contains failed disks. Import the entire disk group in one operation rather than performing a partial import.
After you perform VM conversion or replication operations to Amazon using the HotAdd method, a Windows instance restarts when a user logs on to the instance for the first time. The restart is required to initialize drivers that are added to the instances during the operation.