I'm trying to restore a Hyper-V VM using Backup Exec 2014.
My VMs are part of a Hyper-V cluster which is managed using Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2.
To restore the VM, I right clicked on the cluster and choose restore, then I chose the VM I want to restore. In the "Where do you want to restore the data?" Page there are four options
- To the original location
- To a different location keeping the same drive and path locations
- To a different location keeping the same path, while changing the drive
- To a different location: prefix the source drive and path with a new drive and path
I went for the fourth option as I need to restore a VM into the Hyper-V cluster without over writing the existing VM and while the VM is still running.
These are the results of the restores:
A. If the original VM is powered on in the Hyper-V Cluster, the restore will fail with the following error message:
The restore job cannot continue because the virtual machine is running or is powered on. Check the job properties, or power off the virtual machine, and then run the job again. Final error category: Resource Errors
B. Then I Powerd Off the Virtual machine and re-ran the same job. This time the job failed complaining about the VM already exist:
Backup Exec cannot restore the virtual machine. Another virtual machine already exists with the same ID. Remove the virtual machine that has the same ID from the Hyper-v or Virtual Server Administration Console, and then try the restore operation again. See the job log and the Windows Event Viewer for more details. Final error category: Resource Errors
C. As a work around I renamed the VM and re ran the task.
This time the restore works but there was still two issues. 1) The VM wasn't Highly Available in the cluster 2) I had to run a Live Migration/Storage Live Migration which had to copy the VHDx files to another LUN and then made the VM Highly available
My Idea:
There was no option in the Backup Exec restore wizard to rename the VM before starting the restore operation. It would be handy to have the ability to do so as it will speed up the restore process and I don't need to power off the original VM especially if I'm attempting to do a restore during business hours.
The other thing Backup Exec did not make the restored virtual machine highly available which made the restore process even longer as I needed to run this manually and recopy all the data.