Backup and Restore with VDP 5.5

In my previous article I showed you how to install and configure the VDP 5.5 Advanced appliance and access it via the new vSphere Web Client.  In this article I'm going to show you how to create a backup job and then perform your first restore.

Backing up your Virtual Machines

Log into the Web Client and connect to your VDP appliance:

On the first screen you can select the option to Create Backup Job or this can be achieved via the Backup tab at the top:

You first need to select type of backup you wish to perform.  You can either backup all data in a virtual machine i.e. all VMDK's or choose specific VMDK's.  I'm going to choose to create a Full Image which will backup all VMDK's.  Click Next to continue:

Choose which virtual machines you wish to backup.  In my case I'm going to backup the entire Production cluster.  Click Next to continue:

Now select your required schedule.  From here you can select when you wish to perform your backups and at what time.  I'm going to leave the default option of Daily.  Click Next to continue:

Now select your retention policy.  This obviously depends on the amount of available storage you have allocated and available.  For this example I am just going to store 7 days work of backups.  Click Next to continue:

Give you job a meaningful name and click Next:

Finally click Finish to create the job:

The backup job should be successfully created.  If you receive an error message indicating that one or more clients could not be added to the job you can check the log via Configuration tab and then Log.  In my case it failed to add the VDP appliance and a Windows 2012 template to the backup job which is absolutely fine.

If you click the Backup tab you should now see your newly created backup job.  Since the job hasn't been run before you should see 0 successes and failures and the next run time should be at 20:00

You can either choose to leave the backup job to run at it's next run time or force the job to run now by highlighting the job, clicking on Backup Now and then selecting Backup all sources:

Depending on the size of your environment it may take a while for the jobs to complete.  In my case one of my virtual machines failed to backup and the log indicated that there was a snapshot present.  When I checked there was no snapshot but performing the good old trick of creating and then removing the snapshot resolved the issue.  You can monitor the progress of the backup jobs by clicking on the More Tasks in the Web Client recent tasks pane:

Once the job completes you can verify that all virtual machines were successfully backed up by selecting the Backup tab and checking the Success Count and  Failures Count:

Restoring a Virtual Machine

We will now go through the steps in restoring a virtual machine from the most recent backup we just completed.  Click on the Restore tab and browse to a virtual machine that you wish to restore (You can drill down even further to restore a specific VMDK rather than the whole virtual machine) then click the Restore button:

Choose the restore point and click Next:

Select your restore options.  In my case I'm going to restore the virtual machine to another location and under a different name as I don't want it to impact the original virtual machine.  Click Next once you've made your changes:

If your happy then click Finish to start the restore:

The job should successfully submit and you can once again monitor the job via the tasks screen:

Once the job completes you should see your restored virtual machine within the Web Client inventory.  You can now attach this to whatever network you want and power it on: