Best Practice for Restore with Pre-existing Snapshot
When a backed-up VM had snapshots, disaster recovery software can restore a
replacement VM with its pre-existing snapshots in place. However for partial file recovery,
or to recover a VM back to a point in time, it is difficult to determine how to restore a VM
that has an existing snapshot. Should parts of the snapshot be restored to a previous state
(if applicable), or only the VM by ignoring the snapshot?
Certain backup-restore applications do not
handle this situation well; snapshot contention causes a
GenericVmConfigFault
. One good solution is for customers to delete
any pre-existing snapshots before recovery, especially if not needed. This is mandatory
for SAN transport recovery, anyway. Restore applications could refuse to recover a VM
until any pre-existing snapshot is deleted. If not, a customer work-around is to recover
the VM to a different location, avoiding the issue, then retain the recovered VM and
delete the VM with pre-existing snapshot.