How to Restore Virtual Machines using user Roles, is the first of blog posts about Veeam that I will post in the next weeks.

In this first article about Veeam, I will focus on how to use Veeam to Restore Virtual Machines using User Roles.

This feature is one of the useful features in Veeam Backup Replication. However, this feature on Veeam Backup Replication is only available for Enterprise Plus licenses.

This week I needed to implement a similar scenario for the company so that some teams can have access to their VMs and restore without the need for IT Backup department intervention.

For that, I created some user role with Restore Operator. This type of role only have permissions to Restore VMs through the Veeam Enterprise Manager Portal.

Also crucial in this user roles is that we can restrict which VMs those users can view and can restore.

Note: Creating User Role with the restriction of VMs is only possible with Enterprise Plus license. Lower license is only possible to create user role (like Backup/Restore Operator but only have access to all VMs in that backup server).

• How to create user roles and create restrictions per Cluster/VMs.

To access Veeam Backup Portal open a browser and launch:

https://VeeamBackupServerDNSname:9443

Example: https://veeam-backup.vmwarehome.lab:9443

1. Enter your credentials (Domain\User) and enter the portal.

2. In the main portal page click on Configuration in the right upper corner

3. In this configuration, section, click Roles and Add to create a User Role.

4. Next in the select the type of account (in this case is a user, but can be a Group).

Add the user (can be a local user from your Backup Server or a domain user).

Select the Role for this user. In this case, this user can only do restores. So we select Restore Operator.

Next, in the Restore scope section, click the option Selected machines only and then Choose.

5. Next, select the type of object (system) where are the Virtual Machines that plan to give this user access to restore.

For this case is a VMware a Virtual Machine, then the wizard will show all vCenters and Servers that you manage in your Veeam Backup Server Infrastructure.

7. Select your vCenter/Server that this user will get permissions.

8. Next, you select the Cluster\Folders\VMs that this user will manage.

For this case, I select vCenter the VMs and Folders view and select all the Folders that is needed and click OK.

9. Next, check the list, add more if needed (for example, from a Hyper-V) and click OK.

10. Next, you are back to the role section.

Add any other objects that user can have permissions like restoring individual files from VM Guest OS, Microsoft Exchange Objects, or Databases.

All those areas we can add or block access to the type of VMs, Files, and Objects that this user can Restore (or have access to the backups).

Finish the creating of this user Role by clicking OK.

We can now see the new user in the account that has access to your Veeam Backup Server. In this case to restore.

After finishing the user, we can now restore in the next section VMs and Files using this user.

• How to Restore a Virtual Machine.

We can connect directly to the Veeam Server with RDP and launch Veeam Software to restore/backup VMs, but since this is a how-to using Veeam Portal and only for Restore VMs, we will only use the Veeam Portal.

1. Open Veeam Enterprise Manager Portal

2. Next, in the tab Machines, you can pick a VM on the list, or click in the search and enter the name of the VM that you want to restore.

3. Next, when the VM that you wrote pop-up in the VMs list, click on the VM and click the Restore.

Also, you can click on the Restore Points to check the restore points and the dates of the backups.

4. Next, you need to select if you want the Veeam Restore to replace the Virtual Machine (if still exists in vCenter) or keep the original and create a new copy.

If the option is to keep, Veeam creates a new VM with name vmname-restored-data.

Note: Be aware if you select Overwrite, Veeam Backup will delete your original VM in vCenter.

For this case, I will use the option Keep.

11. Next, select the restore point for this restore and click Finish. In this case, I will use the latest one.

Note: You can enable Power on after the restore, or disable and Veeam will not power on the VM after the restore.

After the restore process started, we can see the process log in the VM Restore History tab.

After the VM is restored in the same location (folder, Cluster, etc.) but with a different name.

The above process is to restore a Virtual Machine with Veeam Backup Server.

To recover a Guest OS file (from Windows or Linux) then the process is a little bit different.

• How to Restore a Guest OS File.

1. Connect to Veeam Backup Portal and select Files tab.

2. Search for the Virtual Machine you want to restore the file from. You can use the field search or click “Pick up from List…” to find your VM.

3. If the Virtual Machine you select is a Windows VM, then automatically the Veeam will mount the Virtual Disks, and now you can browse for the file you need to restore and restore it.

Note: If virtual disks were not automatically mounted, click the mount button.

Besides the mount button, you can click the calendar and select the Backup date and the restore point to mount.

4. For this example, I select a file from the c:\users\administrator\My.Documents\ folder. The file is Default.rdp.

When restoring the file, you will find different options to restore.

1. Restore to the original VM, again with option Overwrite or Keep.

2. Download the file (meaning that you can restore to your computer).

After the file is restored from Veeam, click download to download the file to your computer.

3. Add to the restore list (meaning that you can add several files to the restore list and then select the type of restore).

With the last task and different options to restore, we finish the restore process.

Final thoughts?

In this Veeam How to Restore Virtual Machines using user Roles, we explain how to create user roles and give permissions for a user to restore Virtual Machines and Guest OS files. But also Microsoft Objects (like SQL and Exchange objects).

When restoring Guest OS files from a Linux Virtual Machines, the process is a little bit different and needs to use a feature\appliance call FLR helper configuration settings.

Is possible to use this feature in Veeam Backup Portal, but FLR appliance needs to be enabled in the Veeam Backup Server.

From Veeam:

To perform Linux machine guest files restore, FLR helper appliance should be configured on the corresponding Veeam backup server (one that controls the backup job processing selected machine).

You can, however, restore Linux files directly from the Veeam Backup Server console. You need to login to Veeam Backup server, launch Veeam Backup Console and select the Restore Wizard for Linux files.

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