What is VM Instant Restore and Live Migration?

VM instant restore allows the hypervisors to run a VM directly from its backup data resides in the backup storage. There’s no need to restore the backup data to the production storage before you can bring the VM back online. With VM instant restore of Vinchin Backup & Recovery, a business critical service VM can be recovered within a minute.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery performs instant restore by creating a new VM using the hypervisor’s API, and then mount the backup data to the new VM as its virtual disk by using NFS protocol. 

With the virtual full backup technology of Vinchin Backup & Recovery, instant restore can work with all kinds of restore points, no matter full, incremental or differential. 

In order to prevent the instant restore from changing the original backup data, the backup data will be mounted in read-only mode, a cache area will be used to store the new data generated during the runtime of the instant restored VM. 

And during the runtime of the instant restored VM, you can use live migration of Vinchin Backup & Recovery to migrate the VM data (including new data in cache area) from backup storage to the production storage. 

Live migration feature of Vinchin Backup & Recovery is dedicated for migrating instant restored VM, and it is recommended to use Vinchin's live migration feature instead of the built-in migration feature of the hypervisor, because the live migration will be performed in 3 stages to guarantee the data consistency of the instant restored VM.

On stage 1, it will first migrate the original backup data of the VM to the production storage. On stage 2, migrate the new data from the cache to the production storage. On stage 3, the instant restored VM will be automatically powered off, and some more new data generated during powering off process will be migrated, then the migrated VM will be powered on with the latest state.