Restoring a Full Virtual Machine for Hyper-V

Full virtual machine restores are useful in the following situations:

You are unable to turn on the virtual machine, but the disks (VHD files) are available for the machine.
You want to restore an entire virtual machine to a specific point in time.
You want to move the virtual machine to a new Hyper-V host. If the virtual machine's original location is not optimal, moving the VM to a new host enables you to distribute restored virtual machines to a location with greater space and resource availability.
You can change the name of a virtual machine or of virtual machine disk files when restoring a virtual machine to a new location or to the Hyper-V default folder. Renaming the virtual machine avoids data loss if a virtual machine or disk with the same name already exists in the specified location.
You can generate new GUIDs for the restored VM.
You can reuse the existing VM client and map its information, such as Client Name, Host Name, and Client id to the source VM.

Restoring to a Cluster Shared Volume

You can restore a virtual machine to a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) in a Hyper-V cluster.

Before you restore, in the Failover Cluster Manager, identify the owner of the CSV where you want to restore the virtual machine.

Make sure that the user account provided during the creation of the virtualization client is part of the following administrator groups:

Hyper-V Administrators group
Local Administrators group (for Windows Hyper-V Server 2008 R2)

For a Hyper-V cluster, the user account must have full Cluster Permissions (Read and Full Control).

Considerations

If a virtual machine is added to subclient content or to a filter by browsing and selecting the VM display name, discovery is performed based on the GUID for the VM. If that virtual machine is later restored in place from a backup, a new GUID is generated, and that virtual machine is no longer identified correctly. To identify that VM, you must remove the old rule, then add a new rule or use a name pattern to select the VM.
If you perform an out-of-place restore for a Hyper-V 2016 virtual machine that was configured with pass-through disks, and the source VM remains in place, the restored VM might fail to start. To start the restored VM, remove the pass-through disks manually.
If you select Full Virtual Machine as the restore type, you cannot select a configuration file or a VHD file for the selected virtual machines.
If you restore a shared folder from one client computer to another client computer, the share status of the folder is restored.
Backed up data from clients running the current Commvault version cannot be restored to clients running older versions.
If a virtual machine with the same name already exists on the selected Hyper-V server, all the data and configuration of the virtual machine will be overwritten by the restored virtual machine. To avoid this, you can change the name of the virtual machine while restoring it to a different Hyper-V server.
Windows 2012 R2 virtual machines must be restored to a Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V server. Restores to an earlier version of Hyper-V server (Windows 2012 or 2008 R2) is not supported.

Prerequisites

If the VMs that you want to restore are configured with Hyper-V Replica, disable replication in Replica. After restoring the VMs, you can re-enable replication.

Procedure

From the Command Center navigation pane, go to Protect > Virtualization.

The Virtual machines page appears.
Click the VM groups tab.

The VM group page appears.

The VM groups area displays summary information for any existing VM groups.
On the VM groups tab, in the row for the VM group, click the action button , and then click Restore.

The Select restore type page appears.
To choose a different Backup Gateway or source copy for the restore, do the following:
1. In the upper-right corner of the page, click Settings.
  
  The Settings dialog box appears.
2. For Backup Gateway, decide whether to have the Commvault Cloud software automatically select the Backup Gateway or to specify a Backup Gateway:
  - Automatic: By default, the Commvault Cloud software selects the Backup Gateway for the restore operation based on availability and environment.
  - To restore data using a specific Backup Gateway, from the list, select a Backup Gateway.
3. For Source, decide whether to have the Commvault Cloud software automatically select the copy of backup data or to specify the copy:
  - Automatic: By default, the restore operation searches for the requested data in the primary copy and selects a different copy if the data is not found in the primary copy.
  - To restore from a specific copy of backup data, from the list, select a backup copy.
4. Click Save.
Select Full virtual machine.

The Restore page appears.
Select the content to restore, and then click Restore.

The Restore options dialog box appears.
For Type, select In place.
From the Access node list, select the access node or the access node group to use for the restore.

If you are restoring multiple VMs, select Automatic to distribute the VMs in the restore job across the access nodes that are assigned for the VMware destination hypervisor.

VMs are assigned to access nodes using the round-robin method.

The Automatic option is available for full VM restores from streaming backups or IntelliSnap backup copies.

If you select an access node group to restore VMs, the Commvault software distributes the workload (instances or VMs) in the restore job across the access nodes (also called proxies) that are available in the access node group.
To automatically start the restored VM, move the Power on VMs after restore toggle key to the right.
To replace an existing VM with the restored VM, move the Unconditionally overwrite if it already exists toggle key to the right.
Under Additional options, specify the following:
- For Disk provisioning, do the following:
  - To retain the provisioning method that was used at the time of backup, select Original.
  - To specify a different disk provisioning method, select Thick Lazy Zero, Thin, or Thick Eager Zero.
- For Transport mode, do the following:
  - To have the Commvault Cloud software automatically select the best transport mode for the environment, select Auto.
  - To specify a specific transport mode, select the transport mode.
  - Generate new GUID for VMs: To generate a new GUID for the restored VM, move the toggle key to the right.
  - Reuse existing VM client: To redirect the restored VM client to the source VM, move the toggle key to the right. Enabling this option will map all information, such as Client Name, Host Name, and Client id of the VM client to the source VM.
Click Finish.

What To Do Next

When restoring a Hyper-V virtual machine from a Windows 2008 host to a Windows 2012 R2 host, the network adapter settings are not restored. You must manually attach the network adapter after the restore is complete.