There are a number of options when it comes to restoring a full VM be it an urgent restore or even a test. It's important that you know what's the best option for you:
Restore VM as Clone
The guest VM backup will be restored to a new location and will be given a new name. The original guest VM will not be overwritten and you will end up with the cloned VM running side by side with the original VM.
Restore a Single Virtual Disk
The Virtual Disk Restore functionality was introduced allowing you to restore single VHDX or VMDK file from your backup set. Thereby this could save you a lot of time on your restore operations especially if you just need a single small virtual disk.
File Granular Restore or Instantly Mount Virtual Disks
The File Granular Restore and the Instant Mount Virtual Disks are two similar features. File Granular Restore allows you to browse the contents of a virtual disk via a file browser view in VM Backup allowing you to restore single files/folders.
The Instant Mount Virtual Disks feature will mount a virtual disk to your Windows machine, here you will be able to browse and restore your files via Windows Explorer. The Instant Mount offers a couple of benefits on top of the File Granular Restore feature:
- support for ReFS formatted partitions
- maintaining Permission/Date attributes on files/folders
- Search functionality via Windows Explorer
- support for partitions that have Windows Data Deduplication (the role must also be enabled where the VM Backup machine is installed)
Please note these requirements for performing a successful granular restore of your data.
Exchange Granular Restore
This feature allows you to restore individual items from your Exchange Mailbox database from any Guest VM backup.
Boot from Backup
The Boot from Backup feature allows you to instantly boot any VM version directly from the backup location, thus drastically reducing RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives).
There are two options available when Booting a VM from your Backups:
Verification mode - Instantly boots up your backed up VMs in read only mode for verification purposes. Changes made to the booted VM will be discarded when done.
Recovery mode - If disaster strikes, the VM can be booted up instantly from the backup drive with minimal downtime, while the VM is restored back to the Hypervisor in the background. A simple VM reboot completes the recovery process and preserves any changes done while the VM was booted.
Restoring to a different Host
A guest VM backup which was taken from Host A can be restored to Host B. The VM will be restored to a new location on the new host.
Sandbox Restore & Verification
This feature allows you to perform verification and test restores of your backed up guest VMs.
Degradation and failure of storage devices is not uncommon, and this feature will allow you to compare the data on your drive to a checksum taken at the time of backup to verify the integrity of your data on disk, and restore peace-of-mind.