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Happy Tuesday! :sunglasses:

I’ll try and post a little pop quiz question each day, hope to hear from many of you. Did you know the answer? Did you look it up in the documentation? Did you try it in a lab? Please share some details along with your answer.

Your production virtual machine leverages one or more virtual RDM disks. The operations team is documenting which restore procedures are available. Which restore options can be used to keep the vRDM intact as opposed to the restore converting to a VMDK?

Restore using the Full VM Restore Wizard, but tick the "Quick rollback" check box. This is the only procedure which supports the vRDM format.

This time I did not have to lookup in the documentation, we have discussed this lately @haslund :sunglasses:

I believe you can just create a NAS Backup of the data on the drive, then just restore the data from the NAS Backup, whether it’s vRDM or VMDK. I actually have a job for just that purpose. I also have the VM in a regular b/u job as well.

Per @JMeixner ...documentation explicitly states his answer on pg. 1396 of the user guide for vSphere. Rasmus...I think my answer would fulfill the requirements as well, correct? I mean, if you’re asking in the event you need to recover the disk and/or whole VM, then ‘no’; but if the requirement is to just keep the disk/VM in place & just need to restore the data, then NAS Backup restore works.

BTW...I like this question a little better. Still somewhat a ‘nit-picky’ question, but at least findable 😁

Based on what I know and from the documentation you need to use Quick Rollback to preserve the vRDM format otherwise other restore options will convert the vRDM to VMDK. https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/incremental_restore.html?ver=110

 

Yes @coolsport00 , the question does not say if the disk has to be restored or the data only.

I think in the case that the data only has to be restored your solution is correct, too. But then you could do a file-level-restore, too.

But I am not completely sure, if these methods will affect the vRDM format or not….

As I thought. But honestly..think Rasmus was looking for the answer you gave :)

I believe you can just create a NAS Backup of the data on the drive, then just restore the data from the NAS Backup, whether it’s vRDM or VMDK. I actually have a job for just that purpose. I also have the VM in a regular b/u job as well.

I guess it depends on exactly what is running on these machines, but just for some individual file backup/restore this could definitely work out. For apps, probably could be a lot of locked files during backups?

Yeah..I don’t have apps; the VM is just a file share VM.

Thanks for the quiz and the answers, well learning now .. :)

Agree with @JMeixner ! VBR backups vRDM as VMDKs. So each other restore would create a VMDK instead of keeping the existing vRDM.

Just mentioning that @haslund didn’t mention if the backup is taken with VBR, it could also being done with Veeam Agent. Also then it is only possible to export to VMDK, VHD, VHDX. 

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