> Commvault Cloud > Virtualization > VMware > Restores

About Live Recovery for VMware

With live recovery, you can recover and power on a VM from a backup without waiting for a full restore of the VM.

You can use live recovery to do the following:

  • Recover a VM that failed and needs to be placed back in production quickly

  • Validate that a backup can be used for disaster recovery

Requirements for Live Recovery

  • Live VM recovery is supported for recovery from the following types of backups:

    • Streaming backups

    • Backup copies that use magnetic disk libraries

  • Live VM recovery is not supported for the following operations:

    • Backups to tape libraries

    • Archived VMs

    • Multiple VM restores in the same job

    • Simultaneous live recovery and live browse operations for the same virtual machine

  • The operating system of the Backup Gateway that is used for live recovery does not need to match the operating system of the guest VM. For example, a Windows Backup Gateway can be used to recover a Linux VM.

Live Recovery Process

Data is restored from the backup as needed to enable the operations requested by the VM, and the full restore completes as resources allow. The backup is not modified by the restore process.

The process is as follows:

  1. When this option is selected for a restore, the restore operation can use the Backup Gateway that was used to perform the backup.

  2. Rather than reading the backup, the restore process exposes the backup to the destination ESX server as a network file system (NFS) export.

  3. The NFS export is mounted to the destination ESX server as an NFS datastore.

  4. When the NFS datastore is visible to the ESX server, the restore process retrieves the .vmx and catalog files for the VM.

    The .vmx file is modified to indicate that writes can be made to the VMDK files on the NFS datastore (or the VM can be modified to redirect writes to an alternate datastore).

  5. When the VM files are available to the NFS datastore, the VM is registered and can be powered on.

  6. Any reads for the virtual machine disks are handled by the access node (Backup Gateway), which restores the requested data to the NFS cache and presents it to the ESX server.

  7. A storage vMotion is initiated to migrate the virtual machine to the destination datastore specified for the restore.

  8. The ESX server unexports the backup and unmounts the datastore (if no other paths are exported to the ESX server).

  9. The restore job is marked as complete.

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