See all blog posts in this series:

1. From VMware to IBM Cloud VPC VSI, part 1: Introduction
2. From VMware to IBM Cloud VPC VSI, part 2: VPC network design
3. From VMware to IBM Cloud VPC VSI, part 3: Migrating virtual machines
4. From VMware to IBM Cloud VPC VSI, part 4: Backup and restore
5. From VMware to IBM Cloud VPC VSI, part 5: VPC object model
6. From VMware to IBM Cloud VPC VSI, part 6: Disaster recovery
7. From VMware to IBM Cloud VPC VSI, part 7: Automation
8. From VMware to IBM Cloud VPC VSI, part 8: Veeam Backup and Replication

Previously we examined methods for backing up your IBM Cloud VPC VSI workloads using volume snapshots and using file-level recovery.

It’s also possible to leverage enterprise backup software such as Veeam Backup and Replication to perform volume-level backup and restore of your VSI workloads, but this requires a little more effort. Here are some high-level pointers for using Veeam specifically:

1. VBR 13 is available in an appliance form factor, including both ISO and OVA. Installation of the OVA in IBM Cloud VSI is possible but tricky. The OVA contains two disks and these must be extracted and transferred separately to a boot volume (or image) and a data volume before deploying them together as part of a single VSI.
2. You must use the Veeam Agent for Windows and the Veeam Agent for Linux to perform backups of your VSI workloads.
3. For restore, if your boot volume is not corrupted, you can use the Veeam agent on your VSI to perform restore of files, folders, and data volumes.
4. If your boot volume is corrupted, you can recover the original boot volume by the following process:
   1. Create a new VSI or use an existing VSI running the Veeam agent
   2. Delete your original VSI being careful to preserve all of the volumes
   3. Attach the volume(s) you wish to restore to the VSI previously selected
   4. Use the Veeam agent to restore the volume from backup
   5. Detach the volume(s) from this VSI
   6. Recreate your original VSI using the original volumes, and boot it

The recovery process described above is not sufficient to migrate a Veeam backup from a VMware environment to a VSI. This is because the recovery process does not address other aspects of migration including the installation of virtio drivers and cloud-init.