How to Recover Data for Virtual Machines

  • Article

Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

When you add a virtual machine to a protection group, you are protecting the complete configuration of the virtual machine, including operating system, applications, and application data. However, you cannot directly recover application data from the recovery points for the virtual machine; you can recover only the entire virtual machine.

To recover application data only for applications running in virtual machines, you must select the application data explicitly as a protection group member. You must have a protection agent installed on the guest operating system.

To recover data for virtual machines

  1. In DPM Administrator Console, click Recovery on the navigation bar.

  2. Browse or search for the virtual machine name you want to recover, and then, in the results pane, select the data.

  3. Available recovery points are indicated in bold on the calendar in the recovery points section. Select the bold date for the recovery point you want to recover.

  4. In the Recoverable item pane, click to select the recoverable item you want to recover.

  5. In the Actions pane, click Recover. DPM starts the Recovery Wizard.

  6. Review your recovery selection, and click Next.

  7. Specify the type of recovery you would like to perform:

    1. Recover to original instance. The current files will be overwritten during recovery.

    2. Recover to a network folder. Click Next, and on the Specify Destination dialog box, click Browse to browse for a folder where you want to copy the database files.

    3. Copy to tape. Click Next, and on the Specify Library dialog box, select library details and tape options for the recovery. You can also choose to compress or encrypt the data on tape.

  8. Click Next after you have specified one of the preceding options.

  9. Specify your recovery options:

    1. Select Apply security settings of the destination computer or Apply the security settings of the recovery point version. This option is enabled only if you chose Recover to a network folder in step 7.

    2. Enable SAN-based recovery using hardware snapshots. Select this option to use SAN-based hardware snapshots for quicker recovery.

      This option is valid only when you have a SAN where hardware snapshot functionality is enabled, the SAN has the capability to create a clone and to split a clone to make it writable, and the protected computer and the DPM server are connected to the same SAN.

    3. Notification. Click Send an e-mail when the recovery completes, and specify the recipients who will receive the notification. Separate the e-mail addresses with commas.

  10. Click Next after you have specified your recovery options.

  11. Review your recovery settings, and click Recover.

    Note

    Any synchronization job for the selected recovery item will be canceled while the recovery is in progress.

See Also

Concepts

Recovering Data
Recovery Wizard
Working with Recovery Points