Conversion to a virtual machine

Conversion to a virtual machine is available only for disk-level backups. If a backup includes the system volume and contains all of the information necessary for the operating system to start, the resulting virtual machine can start on its own. Otherwise, you can add its virtual disks to another virtual machine.

VMs replicated via native Scale Computing VM replication functionality cannot be backed up.

You can create a separate plan for conversion to a virtual machine and run this plan manually or on a schedule.

For information about prerequisites and limitations, refer to What you need to know about conversion.

This functionality is available in customer tenants for which the Advanced Backup – Servers or the Advanced Backup – NAS quota is enabled as part of the Advanced Backup pack.

To create a plan for conversion to a virtual machine

  1. Click Management > Conversion to VM.

  2. Click Create plan.

    The software displays a new plan template.

  3. To modify the plan name, click the default name.

  4. In Convert to, select the type of the target virtual machine. You can select one of the following:

    • VMware ESXi
    • Microsoft Hyper-V
    • Scale Computing HC3
    • VMware Workstation
    • VHDX files
      To save storage space, each conversion to VHDX files or VMware Workstation overwrites the VHDX/VMDK files in the target location that were created during the previous conversion.

  5. Do one of the following:

    • [For VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, and Scale Computing HC3] Click Host, select the target host, and then specify the new machine name template.
    • [For other virtual machine types] In Path, specify where to save the virtual machine files and the file name template.

    The default name is [Machine Name]_converted.

  6. Click Agent, and then select the agent that will perform the conversion.

  7. Click Items to convert, and then select the backups that this plan will convert to virtual machines.

    You can switch between selecting backups and selecting entire locations by using the Locations / Backups switch in the upper-right corner.

    If the selected backups are encrypted, all of them must use the same encryption password. For backups that use different encryption passwords, create separate plans.

  8. [Only for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V] Click Datastore for ESXi or Path for Hyper-V, and then select the datastore (storage) for the virtual machine.

  9. [Only for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V] Select the disk provisioning mode. The default setting is Thin for VMware ESXi and Dynamically expanding for Hyper-V.

  10. [For VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, and Scale Computing HC3] Click VM settings to modify the memory size, the number of processors, or the network connections of the virtual machine.

  11. Click Schedule, and then change the schedule.

  12. If the backups selected in Items to convert are encrypted, enable the Backup password switch, and then provide the encryption password. Otherwise, skip this step.

  13. To modify the plan options, click the gear icon.

  14. Click Create.