Create a New Virtual Machine

The process of building a virtual machine from backup data involves the following steps:

Procedure

1. Create the virtual machine.

   To create a new virtual machine, you use the information about virtual machine configuration that you derived and saved during the backup process. You might allow users of restore software an opportunity to rename the virtual machine during recovery in case they want to clone or move the virtual machine. Also you might consider offering them an opportunity to change virtual machine layout (for instance, storing virtual disks on a different datastore). Creating the virtual disks is also done at the time when you create the virtual machine. This process is fairly complicated. See the section Low Level Backup Procedures for details.

2. Restore the virtual disk data.

   This process is similar to restoring the contents of virtual disks (step 3 under Restore an Existing Virtual Machine to a Previous State) with the following exception: you must call the VixDiskLib_WriteMetadata() function to write all the disk configuration key/value data into the virtual disk before restoring any backed-up data to the virtual disk. Then call VixDiskLib_Write() to restore the virtual disk data, as described in step 3.

3. Power on the virtual machine.