5 2 0:RHV Restore

Welcome to the latest SEP sesam documentation version 5.2.0 Artemis. For previous documentation version(s), check documentation archive.

Are you looking for an alternative for your VMware environment?

SEP supports a range of hypervisors, offering snapshot-based online backup of VMs.

Click HERE to get an overview of the available SEP modules and explore supported features like CBT, Single File Restore, and more.

Overview

Additional resources

Visit SEP sesam YouTube Channel for latest videos and webinars.

Check FAQ to find the answers to most common questions.

Problems? See the Troubleshooting Guide.

If you are using an older SEP sesam version, refer to Documentation archive.

SEP sesam backup solution for RHV environments was developed together with Red Hat. SEP sesam uses RHV Manager backup (libvirt) API to perform snapshot-based backups of virtual machines (VMs) in RHV environments and enables consistent, agentless backup and restore of all RHV VMs.

Key features

Restoring RHV VMs is very similar to regular file system restore. Note that you can only restore one VM at a time. You can also perform single file restore (SFR).

Scheduling restore is supported only through the GUI (it is not possible to schedule restores in the Web UI). For details, see Scheduling Restore.

Restore options

You can restore your RHV VM to the original location or to another location with the same or a different VM name using relocation.
You can restore your VM to the same or a different single RHV server or RHV cluster.
You can perform a simple path restore of the selected RHV VM configuration directly to a directory on any system instead of restoring and importing VM to the RHV environment.
You can perform a SFR via the web Restore Assistant.

	Note
	Mount is used to restore individual files. Mounting is not possible if the savesets are stored on tapes or if the data is compressed or encrypted. Some other XPRFS restrictions also apply to mounting.

Restore workflow

The restore process uses the following workflow:

The VM configuration is restored to the SEP sesam data mover VM.
The target VM is created from this.
The disks on the target VM are created and attached to the SEP sesam data mover VM.
The data is restored.
The disks are detached from the data mover VM and attached to the target VM.

Prerequisites

To ensure error-free operation of SEP sesam and improve performance, make sure that the following conditions are met:

Check the RHV support matrix for the list of supported RHV versions.
Make sure that your RHV environment is set up properly, as described in RHV Configuration.
Make sure that there is enough free space on the target system where you want to restore your data.
Single file restore (SFR) of backups from virtualization platforms requires the guestfs-tools package to be installed on Linux in order to access and mount VM disk image on Linux. If the package is not installed on your SEP sesam Server or Linux RDS, it is not possible to mount VMDK and perform SFR. Refer to Installing guestfs-tools on Linux.

	Note
	During restore, the virtual disk will consume complete thick provisioned space on the target storage. For example, if you have backed up 1 TB VM disk, 1 TB must be free on the target pool where the VM is created.

Restoring an RHV virtual machine

The following steps are performed in simple UI mode. They cover the most common restore cases and are the recommended method for performing a restore. For more experienced users, some additional restore options are available in the advanced restore mode (click the Advanced View option), e.g. you can restore a single file, write the VM to a file system, write the backup to a dump file, set additional restore options, etc. For details, see Standard Restore Procedure.

A restore task can be scheduled like any other task. If you want to add a restore task to the schedule, see Scheduling Restore.

Note

If you cannot access the web Restore Assistant, check that you have been given the appropriate permissions for online restore.
The operations and options available after logging in may differ depending on the user type. Other Web UI display restrictions may depend on the custom roles with specific permissions and the UI mode.
For details, see About Authentication and Authorization and User Roles and Permissions.

Open the Restore Assistant in the browser.
In the start window, select Red Hat Virtualization and click Next.
In the Virtual Machine window, under Selection of the server, select your RHV server to restore your data to.
Then, under Selection of the virtual machine select the VM you want to restore and click Next.
In the Task window, under Task selection, select your source backup task.
Under Backup selection, select the exact backup version you want to restore. Note that Generation restore is selected by default. You can use the calendar function in the upper right corner to set a date range for the displayed backups.
Click Next.
In the Target window, under the Target selection select your target environment for restore. You can use the drop-down list to select or filter VMs by name.
Then set additional restore options under Execution options:
- Do not overwrite an existing virtual machine: The VM is restored only if it does not already exist on the target system.
- Overwrite an existing virtual machine: If the VM exists on the target server, it will be replaced with the restored version.
Click Next.
Modify or set additional restore options under the Virtualization restore options:
- Data mover: Select the data mover.
- Recovery options: Specify whether or not to start the VM after restore.
- Under Target options of the virtual machine select Storage Domain from the drop-down list.
Click Next.
In the last step, check the summary of your restore task (restore type (based on task type, selected backup, its date and details, restore options, etc.) and click Start restore.

Monitoring restore

You can monitor the restore progress using the Web UI (Monitoring -> Restores) or view the status in the GUI (Main Selection -> Job State -> Restores). The restore overview provides detailed information on the last run of restore jobs, including task name, status (successful, error, in queue...), start and stop time of the last backup, data size, throughput, etc. For details, see SEP sesam Web UI or Restores by State in the GUI.