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Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance 5.12.0.1 Virtual Machine User Guide

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File-level restore and SQL restore requirements and limitations

This section provides a list of requirements and limitations that apply to virtual machine file-level restores and individual SQL database and instance restores.

All platforms

Review the following best practices and limitations that apply to all platforms:

  • You must install VMware Tools version 10 or later. For best results, ensure that all virtual machines run the latest available version of VMware Tools. Older versions are known to cause failures when you perform browse actions during file-level restore or SQL restore operations.
  • Before mounting file systems for virtual machine file level restores, ensure that the target virtual machine for the restore supports the file system type, version, and options used in the source backup. For example, the xfsprogs version of the target virtual machine must be compatible with the xfsprogs version of the source virtual machine.
  • File-level restore is supported only for non-system files or folders (for example, user-created files/folders). When restoring operating system files or folders, or system files or folders such as C:\Windows or C:\Program Files, perform an image-level restore.
  • You can only restore files and/or folders from a Windows backup to a Windows machine, or from a Linux backup to a Linux machine.
  • You can perform file-level restores across vCenter servers as long as the vCenters are configured in PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance, and the source and target virtual machine have the same guest operating system. For example, Linux to Linux, or Windows to Windows.
  • When a file-level restore or SQL-restore operation is in progress on a virtual machine, no other backup or recovery operation can be performed on this virtual machine. Wait until the file-level restore session completes before starting any other operation on the virtual machine.
  • Ensure that the virtual machine has enough free slots to accommodate the disks that will mounted as part of the restore. The total number of supported disks is 60 (4 scsi controllers with 15 disks each).
  • File-level restores do not support the following virtual disk configurations:
    • LVM thin provisioning
    • FAT16 file systems
    • FAT32 file systems on LInux
    • Extended partitions (Types: 05h, 0Fh, 85h, C5h, D5h)
    • Two or more virtual disks mapped to single partition
    • Encrypted partitions
    • Compressed partitions
  • If the VM Proxy agent service is not running on the target virtual machine, VMDKs fail to mount with the error "Cannot connect to vProxy Agent: Unable to connect to '[::1]:<port>'. dial tcp [::1]:<port>: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it."
  • Clean up from a suspended or cancelled mount operation requires a restart of the virtual machine before you can initiate a new mount for the file-level restore.
  • File-level restores do not restore or browse symbolic links.

Windows platforms

Review the following best practices and limitations that apply to Windows platforms:

  • To browse all of the disk drives of a backup copy, the copy should be from a virtual machine that has the following Windows permission settings in the Advanced Security Settings for the Local Disk at each disk drive level for both the SYSTEM and <COMPUTER-NAME>\Administrators Principal:
    • Type: Allow
    • Access: Full Control
    • Applies to: This folder, subfolders and files
  • Ensure that the target virtual machine's SCSI Controller 0 is not empty by attaching the slot to a virtual disk. Otherwise, the file-level restore is unable to mount the disks from the backup copy.
  • Windows 2012 R2 and earlier versions do not support paths longer than 255 characters. To reduce the number of characters in the restore path, you might be required to remove the Windows drive letter, the colon, the slash, and the trailing null character. Since the Windows VM Proxy agent mount point already uses around 90 characters, you might need to select a folder at a higher directory level for the restore.

    For Windows 2016 and later, an option to enable support for longer file paths is available. See the following article.

  • File-level restores of Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2016 virtual machines are not supported on the following file systems:
    • Deduplicated NTFS
    • Resilient File System (ReFS)
    • EFI bootloader
  • File-level restores of virtual machines with Windows dynamic disks are supported with the following limitations:
    • The restore can only be performed when recovering to a virtual machine different from the original. Also, this virtual machine cannot be a clone of the original.
    • The restore can only be performed by virtual machine administrator users.
    • If Windows virtual machines were created by cloning or deploying the same template, then all of these Windows virtual machines may end up using the same GUID on their dynamic volumes.
  • When you perform file-level restore on Windows 2012 R2 virtual machines, the volumes listed under the virtual machine display as "unknown." File-restore operations are not impacted by this issue.
  • When you enable Admin Approval Mode (AAM) on the operating system for a virtual machine (for example, by setting Registry/FilterAdministratorToken to 1), the administrator user cannot perform a file-level restore to the end user's profile, and an error displays indicating "Unable to browse destination." For any user account control (UAC) interactions, the administrator must wait for the mount operation to complete, and then access the backup folders located at C:\Program Files (x86)\EMC\vProxy FLR Agent\flr\mountpoints by logging into the guest virtual machine using Windows Explorer or a command prompt.

Linux platforms

Review the following best practices and limitations that apply to Linux platforms:

  • On Linux virtual machines, Logical Volume (LV) names longer than 100 characters are not supported.
  • When you perform file-level restore on Ubuntu/Debian platforms, you must enable the root account in the operating system. By default, the root account will be in locked state.

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