topic Re: Restoring Larger Virtual Machines in VMware Solutions Discussions

Restoring Larger Virtual Machines

menzies — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 05:53:25 GMT

We have been discussing a challenge that I wanted to throw out to the wider community. The challenge is what is the best method to restore a large (VMware) virtual machine?

Some context:

7-Mode 8.x environment
vSphere 5
Virtual machines up or over 1.5TB in size

The customer is using VSC but when restoring the VM it is taking a very long time, consuming a lot of resource on the controller and they have had the restore fail.

Our understanding is that the VSC process is using SFSR so essentially doing a copy which is why it takes so long. A couple of suggestions that have been put forward:

Using Storage VMotion to speed the process. If anyone has recent references to this and / or experience it would be useful
Manually use sisclone to do it

Both methods are outside VSC which is a shame, but if anyone does have practical experience of either approach or another we would be keen to hear.

Many thanks

Craig Menzies

Re: Restoring Larger Virtual Machines

dburkland — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 18:31:16 GMT

I have ran into similar issues before and have done the following to restore larger VMs:

Mount the VSC backup of the VM's datastore
Remove the bad copy of the VM from the VMware inventory (You can delete it as it is useless at this point)
Browse into the mounted VSC backup datastore and import the VM into the inventory
Power on the VM and validate that it is working properly
Storage vMotion the VM back to its original datastore
Unmount the VSC backup datastore

This process seemed to work well however we were using 10GbE-connected NFS datastores. Hopefully in the future VSC will be able to perform sisclone operations for any restore jobs.

Hope this helps,

Dan

Re: Restoring Larger Virtual Machines

menzies — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 06:36:42 GMT

Dan, thank you for the quick reply.

Good to hear someone as worked through this process.