SUMMARY
Instantly Recovering VMs
ISSUE
When Instant VM Recovery is initiated, a temporary data store is created on the Unitrends backup storage and then presented to the hypervisor. The VM is then started and begins running right from the backup storage.
You have the choice of creating this job as an Audit mode for testing, or as a Live mode restore which returns the VM to production. If you were testing only, you would simply end the instant recovery session after verifying your backup. Live Mode recovery leverages VMWare Storage vMotion to migrate the VM back to production networks, which requires a minimum VMWare Standard edition license and a vCenter managing your esxi target node. Hyper-V Instant Recovery requires Hyper-V 2012R2 or higher.
VMware Storage vMotionTM and Instant Recovery
After instantly recovering your virtual machines, you can leverage the tools that you are already licensed for through VMware to migrate your data into your production storage to ensure the best performance. This process involves no downtime and ensures all changes that occurred while running from the temporary backup storage are moved with the VM to production. Not VMware does not make this technology available to ESXi Free, Essentials, or Essentials Plus editions today. VMWare Standard edition or higher plus a vCetner is a minimum requirement.
VMWare Replicas
Unitrends offers another Instant Recovery Technology called VMWare Replicas. This technology effectively pre-restores VMs configured with this option to your licensed ESXi node. Future backups you take for that VM are merged into that replica, including the option to maintain up to 14 prior snapshot checkpoints. Any checkpoint can be booted in audit or live mode by the Unitrends administrator.
This technology differs from Instant Recovery such that it required production resources to be dedicated to the replica in advance of need to restore. Additionally, the replica may need to be town down and recreated should certain changes be made to your VM's original configuration. This technoloigy however provides raw local resource performance as assigned to the replica and is ideal for VMs that require more than basic IO and resource performance as it will run as fast as the hardware you deploy it on.
More information about VM Replicas vs VM instant Recovery as well as other detailed requirements and instructions can be found in Chapter 14 of the Unitrends Admin Guide.