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htt
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How to Restore a VM to Another VM Using Backup Exec

Hi All,

I am testing VMware 3.5. We have little budget so we plan to convert 5 - 10 dev servers into VM running on an existing HP ML570. I created a test VM; I was able to back up and restore the whole VM using Backup Exec from a physical server without a problem. However I cannot restore a VM to a different VM. Let's say I have VM01; I backed up VM01 using Backup Exec on the physical server. Pretending the host failed I rebuilt a new host, created a new VM with same name VM01 and same specs. I restored VM01 from the backup. The restore ran successully; however it got a blue screen when I rebooted the VM. The blue sceen went so fat that I don't remember what it was but it is kind of a dll error.

We want to keep the budget as small as possible by using our existing Backup Exec agents but it doesn't seem to work here. Is Backup Exec agent for WMware a MUST? Restore to the same VM is fine but retore to a different VM is not that simple.

Thx.

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AndreTheGiant
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As you can see in http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/buy.html, VCB is included in all VI 3.5 editions.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro

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htt
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Hmm. My bad. If I restored to new VM on same host, there is no problem. The problem I was seeing is restoring to a VM on different host, different hw. I was assuming VM is hw independent so it should not be a problem when I restore to different host. I created the new VM with same specs as the VM I am about to restore from. What did I do wrong?

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AndreTheGiant
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Powered off VMs are hardware independent.

How do you take the backup?

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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htt
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I installed Backup Exec remote agent on the VM and from physical server I used Backup Exec to backup the VM. That is the same way I am backing up my physical servers to tape libraries.

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AndreTheGiant
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With VMs you can manage the backup also in other ways.

I suggest to have a look at VCB ().

Of consider to use the VMware Agent for Backup Exec.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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htt
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I am looking at the link for VCB.

per this link VCB is included with Standard version for VI 4. However we must downgrade to VI 3 because the existing server HP ML570 G3 cannot run VI 4. A sale rep from a reseller said downgrading from Vi 4 to VI 3 will make VCB unavailable. Is this info correct?

Thx.

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AndreTheGiant
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As you can see in http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/buy.html, VCB is included in all VI 3.5 editions.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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Wimo
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I'm not familiar with the full Backup Exec, but I have used Backup Exec System Recovery for V2P and P2P - no reason it wouldn't also work for V2V. There is an option when you restore called Restore AnyWare to restore to different hardware.

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htt
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BE System Recovery is nice but we are trying to keep the cost low by using the existing BE for Windows Server licenses. Thx.

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htt
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you are right that VCB is included with VI3. I will look into the doc. Thx.

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htt
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Andre - I was able to dump the VM using VCB and restore the VM to another ESX host. Thanks for you help.

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