When a business-critical VM goes down, every minute of downtime can be costly and painful. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can recover entire VMs from their backups within seconds. The Flash VM Boot feature enables you to boot VMware VMs directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups, without recovering the entire VMs first. This feature works right out of the box without any special setup: you just choose a VM backup, a recovery point, a recovery location (a host, resource pool, or a cluster where to run the recovered VM), and push a button – the VM is booted in just a few seconds.

Once the VM is running, you can migrate it to production for permanent recovery. What’s important is that the backup from which the VM is booted is not affected, and any changes made to the VMs do not modify or remove data in your VM backup.

In addition to its recovery capabilities, the Flash VM Boot feature also provides you with a rich set of opportunities. For example, you can also do the following:

• Access files and application objects of any application on any OS
• Test system updates and application patches before applying them to your production VM
• Verify the VM backup and ensure that its OS and applications run properly
• Copy a VMDK file and then delete the virtual machine

How Flash VM Boot Works

When you run the Flash VM Boot job, NAKIVO Backup & Replication creates a new VM without disks on the target ESXi server, then exposes VM disks from the Backup Repository as iSCSI targets, and then mounts the exposed disks to the created VM as RDM disks in virtual compatibility mode.

When the VM is created, NAKIVO Backup & Replication creates a snapshot of the VM: this way all changes that occur to the VM are stored in the snapshot.