vRanger PRO 4.2 – error when restoring a copy of a VM to another ESX-host

Recently I tried to restore a virtual machine to another host. The origin machine should remain on the source host. It seems, this is not possible with vRanger PRO:

vRanger PRO 4.2 restore error

The error says: “Cannot continue restore as a virtual machine ‘VM-NAME’ not on host ‘DESTINATION-HOST’ already exists in the root folder for the datacenter.“. This, for me, makes no sense, as I could do a scheduled restore of a VM to another host. This would enable me to quickly start this in case, the sourcehost encounters an error. Especially for Citrix-Servers this would be a perfect setup, as they usually do not contain any user data.

However, I found a workaround:
- on the source machine, right click the VM and select “Remove from Inventory”
- do your restore
- open a SSH-connection on the sourcehost and reregister the VM

This makes the whole thing work, althought it´s quite inconvenient to automate the whole process. The only drawback seems to be that already created backup jobs aren´t able to find the VM anymore (ID-mismatch). I already have a service request regarding this topic. Let´s see what vizioncore has to say about this.

Leave a Reply