NetBackup™ for VMware Administrator's Guide

Note the following about the Instant access virtual machines feature:

• This feature is supported with backup copies that are created from the local or cloud LSU (logical storage unit) using the NetBackup web UI or Instant Access APIs.

  For more information about limitations of instant access for cloud LSU (logical storage unit), refer to the NetBackup Deduplication Guide.

• This feature is supported with backup copies that are created from protection plans or policies.

• This feature is supported for NetBackup Appliance, NetBackup Virtual Appliance, Flex Appliance, and Build Your Own (BYO) server.

  Instant access on Flex WORM storage requires the following services:

  • NGINX, NFS. SAMBA, WINBIND (if Active directory is required), SPWS, VPFS

• This feature is limited to 50 concurrent mount points from a Media Server Deduplication Pool (MSDP) media server or from a WORM storage server. If you have a Flex appliance, this feature is limited to 50 concurrent mount points from each node.

• By default, vSphere allows a maximum of eight NFS mounts per ESXi server. Note that NetBackup requires an NFS mount for each instant access VM you create. To remove the NFS mount, remove the instant access VM when you are done with it.

  If the NFS limit for an ESXi host has been reached and you try to create another instant access VM, the attempt fails. To increase the maximum NFS mounts per ESXi server, see the following VMware article:

  https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2239

• This feature does not support backups of VMs that have independent disks. VMware does not support snapshots of independent disks in a VM, either persistent disks or non-persistent disks. As a result, independent disks are not backed up.

  For more information on independent disks and NetBackup, see the following article:

  https://www.veritas.com/docs/000081966

• This feature does not support VMs that have the disks that were excluded from the backup. For a policy, on the Exclude Disks tab select No disks excluded. For a protection plan, clear the Exclude selected virtual disks from backups check box.

• This feature does not support VMs that have a disk in raw device mapping mode (RDM) or that have a disk in Persistent mode.

• For Windows restore, the ReFS file system is not supported.

• The version of the ESXi server that is used to create a VM using Instant access virtual machines must be equal to or newer than the version of the ESXi server that contains the VM backup images.

• For file or folder download with the Download option, the NetBackup web UI must be able to access the media server with the same name or IP address that the primary server uses to connect to that media server.

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• If the media server appliance uses a third-party certificate, you need to create certain configurations on the NetBackup primary server before you use this feature.

  For more information, refer to the "Third-party certificates" and "Implementing third-party SSL certificates" sections in the NetBackup Appliance Security Guide.

• This feature does not support restore of multiple files or folders, which are located in different volumes, partitions, or disks.

• Use the Windows administrator account credentials when you restore multiple files or folders to a Windows VM. You must be logged on to the target Windows VM with these account credentials.

• Some ACL entries are not in the restored file because ACL entries for these users or groups cannot be restored. For example, TrustedInstallers, All Application Packages.

• The Instant Access feature does not support a Windows 10 compact operating system. To verify if your operating system is compressed, run compact "/compactos:query" on the command prompt before backing up your VM.

  To disable the compression, run "compact /compactos:never" on the command prompt before backing up your VM. You can then use the Instant Access feature for your VM backups.

• To restore files and folders, the target VM must be in a normal state, and not in a sleep or hibernate mode.

• A 5-minutes-alive-session threshold is defined in Appliance and BYO web server NGINX. The files and folders that are selected for download must be compressed and downloaded within this threshold.

• To create an instant access virtual machine, you must have read and write access to the VMware data center where the virtual machine is created.

• To ensure that Instant Access works effectively after the storage server and primary server are upgraded from an earlier NetBackup version, restart the NetBackup Web Service on the upgraded primary server with the following commands:

  /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/nbwmc stop

  /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/nbwmc start

• If you have to download or restore files or folders from a Windows VM, ensure that the number of Windows registry hives are less than 10000.

  More information is available about registry hives.

• An image cannot be deleted if an instant access VM is created from it. The instant access feature uses data from a backup image. If the image is expired, the data might be unavailable and the instant access VM may face data loss. After the instance access VM is deleted, the image can be expired.

• The instant access feature does not support hard links. If you create a universal share from an image and the image has hard link files, vpfsd shows show these hard link files as having 0 bytes size.

• Instant access supports the DataSets feature from vSphere 8.0.