2013/03/17

Veeam Windows FLR and Spanned Volumes

Windows FLR and spanned volumes is something that seems tricky to do file level restores from. Looking at the documentation and release notes didn't make things more clear for me. The release notes (6.5) only state that it is not supported by Multi-OS FLR. So the question is, can you take backups from a spanned volumes and can you restore files? The answer seems to be, yes you can!


To do the test I created a VM with two 1 GB VMDKs


After that I created a spanned volume over the disks. To simulate a proper restore I put some oracle rpm on the disk so that I could try to restore this big file later on. You can see in the screenshots below how I created the volume, added the file and that the spanned volume is 2 GB big.


Now after I ran a backup, I tried to execute a Windows FLR. You can see that I am able to browse the spanned volume (E:), can find the file and even can restore the guest file back to the original location (Veeam will move the original file if it is still there).

Of course you can browse the c:\veeamflr directory or use Enterprise manager to find the file and restore it if guest indexing is enabled.