How To Restore A Virtual Hard Drive Using Avamar

This tutorial will be a continuation of my How to Restore A Physical Server’s Database To A VMWare Server using Avamar where I discuss restores for audit servers. In that tutorial I give a good overview of the benefits of creating dedicated audit servers for validating restores of production servers. Here we will discuss the restore of a virtual drive to a different virtual servers, in this case my audit server.

Just like last time, we are attempting to restore the X: drive of the original production server to this non-production server. The X: drive is where the internal backup of the database, to protect against drive failure, resides on the local server. To start we will login to the audit server and validate the location of the last restored X: drive.

We can see here the name of the X: drive and the storage of 299 GB. Now we will right click the Windows start button and go to Disk Management.

We can see that the disk number that coincides with the name and the same amount of storage is Disk 2.

Now we will go into vCenter and navigate to the VM and Edit Settings.

Now we can see that disk two is Hard disk 3. If you aren’t catching on the numbering, Disk Management numbers 0, 1, 2 while vCenter show disk 1, 2, 3. So 0 is 1, 1 is 2 and 2 is 3.

Now if this was a physical hard drive we could remove it from Disk Management, but as this is a VM we will delete the hard drive from vCenter by moving our mouse over the drive and clicking on the x when it appears.

Then, because we will never need the old restored hard drive we will place a check in the “Delete files from datastore” box

If we look into the Disk Management we will see that the Disk 2 is now missing. Now we need to shutdown the server as we are about to restore or mount this backed up drive to this VM and it needs to be powered off to do this. Now let’s open up our Avamar console and navigate to Backup & Restore. Navigate to the production backup of the server and locate the hard drive we are going to mount to the audit VM. We right click the backup and select “Restore Now…”

Here we will select “Restore to a different (existing) virtual machine” then check “Restore as new disk(s)” as we are going to mount this to our VM. Finally we will click on “Configure Destination…”

Our vCenter should already be selected, but if not select the correct vCenter that has our audit server in it and click “Next”. You will need to navigate into the vCenter until you find the audit server. If it was shutdown then it will show up as not grayed out and select-able. We select it and click “Next”

The next page is a summary page and we click finish. This brings us back to our restore page and we click “OK” to start the restore process.

You will get a warning about compatibility and we again click “OK”.

We can see in the Activity panel that we are “Waiting-Client”

And now “Running”

In vCenter we see in the task plane that the Proxy was reconfigured and so was our audit server.

Once the restore is completed we can check the activity logs and then we know it is safe to boot up the server.

Once the server has booted and we logged in, we will open Windows Explorer (the folder icon) and select “This PC” to see the partitions and hard drives. Here we see that the restored drive is available, but the drive letter is incorrect and we will also rename the drive to the correct name.

Back in Disk Management, we will right click into the partition area of the new drive and go to “Change Drive Letter and Paths…”.

Then we will click on “Change…”

We will select from the drop down menu the letter X and then click OK and then OK again.

Now we can go into the Windows Explorer under This PC once again and we can see the drive letter has changed. We can right click the drive and select rename.

Click off the drive (area) and you will get a warning that you need administrator permission. Click “Continue” and it will be renamed. And that is it, we have successfully restored and simultaneously mounted a backed up hard drive to our recovery server. We can not call in the DBA’s to validate the restore!

As always if you have questions let me hear from you below.

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