Restoring a entire VM from backup - sometimes it overwrites the existing VM and sometimes creates another one!

Hi Paul,

When performing a VM restore you can restore it into original VM ("Original location" in "Where to" part of recovery sheet), assuming that the original VM still exists in vSphere, e.g. that has the same "InstanceUUID" value in vSphere infrastructure - in this case the target VM name doesn't matter (recovery into original VM will work even if VM name has changed). It's not possible however to perform recovery into any existing VM which doesn't match the original. See also the following chapter in the documentation describing this specific.

Thank you.

Hi Vasily and thank you for your reply on this.

I've followed everything you've said and also the link you gave me.

No matter what I do - the restore will create a new VM and append today's date to the name of the VM.

I don't get asked about overwriting during any part of the VM restore.

I can't see how the VM's can be different - as I'm just trying to restore from an original backup from that same exact VM.

I apologise if I'm missing the point with something here - but I don't understand why the InstanceUUID could have changed.

Thanks Vasily,

Paul D

Hi Paul,

The InstanceUUID (it's a vSphere infrastructure property) of the VM could be changed since the time the backup was taken (for example it may happen if the ESXi host got NIC configuration changed, or host was connected to vCenter, or other reasons) - in this case you can only restore into new VM from this backup. If you need to perform recovery into original VM, then you need to capture a new backup of it and perform recovery from this new backup, so that it can do the matching between the VM in the backup and the VM currently present in the vSphere infrastructure.

Thank you.

Thank you for clarifying that a bit more for me, Vasily. I understand why now. It's because I restored these VMs from our production environment to a test lab environment. So, they're sat on a different host from their original one. When I try to restore a copy from a backup done on the test lab system - then I get the option for the incremental restore. :-) Paul D