VM Instant Recovery Installation

Installation: Bacula Storage Daemon

In addition to installing the bacula-enterprise-single-item-restore package as described in Single Item Restore Installation, some extra actions are needed to enable the Instant Recovery feature:

Install and configure the vSphere Plugin

Refer to Bacula’s vSphere plugin documentation for instructions on its installation and configuration.

Install NFS service

To install and configure the NFS server service automatically, run the install-single-item-restore script:

$ /opt/bacula/scripts/install-single-item-restore.sh install_ir

Installation: vSphere side

Test NFS connection on an ESXi host

Since Instant Recovery creates a temporary NFS Datastore on the machine containing the Bacula volumes, we need to make sure that the ESXi hosts can reach it through the NFS ports:

$ ssh <ESXi-host>
$ ping <nfs-datastore>
$ nc -z <nfs-datastore> 2049

For more information, refer to https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1003967.

Set up vMotion

Migration with vMotion requires a vMotion network interface on each ESXi host where you plan to migrate VMs. The vMotion interface can be configured from either a vSphere client or a vSphere Web Client. The steps are:

Navigate to the desired ESXi host
Navigate to the host network settings
Under network settings, click to add networking
Select VMkernel Network Adapter as connection type
Select either an existing switch or a new one
Under port properties, set it to allow vMotion traffic

For more information and best practices please refer to https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2054994.