How to restore a VM from VHD files?

glatour

I need to plan for the worst, how can I restore a VM with metedata and a VHD file? Is it possible?

olivierlambert

Just use XO for it. I'm not sure to understand in which universe you won't be able to do that

glatour

@olivierlambert said in How to restore a VM from VHD files?:

Just use XO for it. I'm not sure to understand in which universe you won't be able to do that

I am asking because about 5 years ago the chain of incremental Veeam backups broke for about 40 VMs and the only thing that saved me was the ZFS replication of the VMs folders/data. After that event, I just like to plan for the worst...

OK so to resume, if I loose all my VMs, my XCP-ng hosts, my pools and the XOA, I can still recover if I have backups on my remotes by:

1- Spin up an XOA on a fresh XCP-ng
2- Restore the XO config from backups
3- Restore VMs from backups

Thank you.

olivierlambert

That's 100% correct. Everything is self contained in the backup storage, and fresh XO on any fresh XCP-ng host will be able to restore all your backups.

Regarding an incremental chain, you can add the option to create a full every XX incremental run, to reduce the risk of a corrupted element in a very long chain of delta.

starmood

Can I continue this topic?

I know I can restore the VM from backup, but just want to check if there is more easier way.

If one host down, and I want to restore(or say import) VM back to new host. Since VHD file is on shared storage, so it's still there and I think it's not that necessary to do a full restore from backup?
So can I get the individual VM configuration file (meta?) from somewhere instead of restoring the Meta backup for the whole pool?

So basically what I'd like to check is, if I can import/restore individual VM configure file with VHD file together, is that possible?

Thanks

olivierlambert

If the storage is still working but you lose all your hosts in the pool, you can use metadata backup/restore to avoid restoring data which is already there.

For any other case, any fresh XOA will be able to reconnect to the backup repository and restore any VM of your choice on whatever host/storage of your choice.

glatour

@olivierlambert said in How to restore a VM from VHD files?:

"you can use metadata backup/restore to avoid restoring data which is already there."

How do you that? Is there a procedure?

olivierlambert

See https://docs.xen-orchestra.com/metadata_backup

starmood

Thanks, so by my understanding, if we restore the meta, it will automatically map those <uuid>.vhd files to VM configuration, correct?
Then can we only restore specified VM meta? Or it's just all or nothing?

lawrencesystems

@starmood For each VM backup run inside of Xen Orchestra it backs up not just the VHD but everything that is needed to restore that VM to any other XCP-ng host. So in a complete loss situation you can load a new XCP-ng Host, setup Xen Orchestra, point the new Xen Orchestra to those backups and restore any of the VM's with all their settings.

The metadata backup of XCP-ng is just that, the metadata of the system and it's not granular. It's good to have because all the things like network setting and what VM's are on the hosts will be there, but the VM backups to me are the most important.

I have a tutorial covering how the backups work, it's from a bit over a year ago and there are EVEN MORE features now and I will be doing a new video this year to cover that.

https://youtu.be/weVoKm8kDb4?si=1z6IDqwnK1cxEGjm

I also have a tutorial on how you can also automate the backup validation process
https://youtu.be/A0HTRF3dhQE?si=gZLXQUqLJmDkIQs6