Restore from snapshots

Your backup system takes snapshots of protected servers on the schedule set by their protection plan

  2 minute read  

Cloud Management Platform (CMP) lists those snapshots on the server and can ask your backup system to restore one.

CMP does not hold the snapshots or perform the restore. It reads the snapshot list from your backup system and passes your request back to it.

Prerequisites

  • The server has a Data Protection Plan value.
  • You are an administrator or hold the Restore Data Protection Snapshots permission. Without it, the tab lists snapshots but shows no Actions column.

Restore a server from a snapshot

  1. Open the server and select the Data Protection tab.
  2. Find the snapshot you want in the table.
  3. In the Actions column, select the restore icon (tooltip: Restore Snapshot…).

CMP returns you to the server page with a link to the restore job or confirmation that the request went to your backup system.

What a restore produces

Only Commvault restores run as a CMP job. For the others, progress is visible in your backup system.

Cohesity

The restored server comes back under a new name: the original hostname with -restore appended. It is powered on with networking enabled. The original server is not touched, so you have two VMs until you remove one.

Rubrik

Rubrik performs an Instant Recovery of the vSphere VM from the selected snapshot under the server’s existing hostname.

Commvault

CMP creates a job and links to it in the banner message. Commvault performs an in-place VM restore with overwrite and powers the machine on. The restore can take a while.

Because the restore replaces the machine rather than editing it, the result is a new VM carrying the old name. For what that means for CMP’s inventory and for access to older backups, see Commvault backup and recovery.

Azure Backup

CMP sends the restore request to Azure through the connection’s Azure resource handler. Azure needs a place to stage the restore, so CMP uses a storage account in the same resource group as the recovery services vault, creating one if it doesn’t exist.

After restoring a vCenter VM

CMP does not learn about the restored VM until it next reads the resource handler’s inventory. Select Sync VMs on the resource handler to pick it up. The restored VM may take some time to appear in vCenter.