5 2 0:OLVM Restore

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Overview

Support for oVirt-based platforms within Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM) enables consistent, agentless backups and restores of OLVM VMs.

Restoring OLVM virtual machines (VMs) is very similar to regular file system restore. You can also perform single file restore (SFR).

Restore options

• You can restore your VM to the original or to a different location with the same or a different VM name using relocation.
• You can restore your VM to the same or a different single OLVM server or OLVM cluster.
• You can perform a simple path restore of the selected OLVM VM configuration directly to a directory on any system instead of restoring and importing VM to the OLVM environment.
• You can perform single file restore – item-level restore of files, folders, and volumes from the COPY backup of OLVM virtual machine by mounting a virtual disk on the device server and browsing the content of a virtual disk file.

Restore workflow

The restore process uses the following workflow:

1. The VM configuration is restored to the SEP sesam data mover VM.
2. The target VM is created from it.
3. The disks of the target VM are created and attached to the SEP sesam data mover VM.
4. The data is restored.
5. 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 OLVM support matrix for supported OLVM versions.
• Ensure that your OLVM environment is properly configured as described in OLVM Configuration.
• 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.
• Make sure that there is enough free space on the target system to which you are restoring your data.

Note

During restore, the virtual disk consumes complete thick provisioned space on the target storage. For example, if you backed up 1 TB VM disk, there must be 1 TB free on the target pool where the VM was created. The operations and options available after logging in may differ depending on the user type. Other GUI and 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.

Restoring an OLVM 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.

In the GUI, 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 if you have received 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.

1. Open the Restore Assistant in the browser.
2. In the start window, select Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager and click Next.

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3. In the Virtual Machine window, under Selection of the server, select your target OLVM server to which the data will be restored.
   Then, under Selection of the virtual machine select the VM you want to restore and click Next.

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4. In the Task window, under Task selection, select your source backup task.
   Then, 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.

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5. 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. You can also select if you want to restore an existing VM with a new name.
Click Next.

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6. 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 Container (OLVM) from the drop-down list.
  
Click Next.


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7. 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.

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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.

See also

Installing guestfs-tools on Linux – Standard Restore Procedure – Single File Restore for Virtual Machines – OLVM Configuration – OLVM Backup

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