Conversion to a virtual machine in a protection plan

You can configure the conversion to a virtual machine from any backup or replication location that is present in a protection plan. The conversion will be performed after each backup or replication.

For information about prerequisites and limitations, please refer to "What you need to know about conversion".

To set up a conversion to a virtual machine in a protection plan

  1. Decide from which backup location you want to perform the conversion.
  2. On the protection plan panel, click Convert to VM under this location.
  3. Enable the Conversion switch.

  4. In Convert to, select the type of the target virtual machine. You can select one of the following:

    • VMware ESXi
    • Microsoft Hyper-V
    • VMware Workstation
    • VHDX files

  5. Do one of the following:

    • For VMware ESXi and Hyper-V: click Host, select the target host, and then specify the new machine name template.
    • For other virtual machine types: in Path, specify where to save the virtual machine files and the file name template.

    The default name is [Machine Name]_converted.

  6. [Optional] Click Agent that will perform conversion, and then select an agent.

    This may be the agent that performs the backup (by default) or an agent installed on another machine. If the latter is the case, the backups must be stored in a shared location such as a network folder, so that the other machine can access them.

  7. [Optional] For VMware ESXi and Hyper-V, you can also do the following:

    • Click Datastore for ESXi or Path for Hyper-V, and then select the datastore (storage) for the virtual machine.
    • Change the disk provisioning mode. The default setting is Thin for VMware ESXi and Dynamically expanding for Hyper-V.
    • Click VM settings to change the memory size, the number of processors, and the network connections of the virtual machine.
  8. Click Done.