Symantec Backup Exec and Restore to Hyper-V Failover Cluster

Assume, that your organization uses Symantec Backup Exec 2010 to backup Hyper-V VMs. What have you to keep in mind, if you need to restore a Hyper-V VM from a backup created by Backup Exec 2010? I've written a couple of points that could be useful to think of to plan such a restore job:

• Backup Exec 2010 can restore as to the same Hyper-V failover cluster, where the VM is backed up as well to a different Hyper-V failover cluster. This method can be used to move VMs between the Hyper-V clusters, especially if the Hyper-V clusters are either not connected at all or connecvted through a WAN at a low speed.
• Backup Exec 2010 doesn't use failover cluster capabilities while restoring a Hyper-V VM and therefore restores to a single Hyper-V node in the cluster directly.
• The restored VM is not failover enabled, because it is restored only to a Hyper-V node. To make the VM failover enabled you must move the restored VM to another Hyper-V node in the failover cluster. Either you export the VM on the Hyper-V node with Hyper-V Manager and import it with Failover Cluster Manager or you can use Microsoft SCVMM to move the VM. Depending on the method of making the VM failover enabled and on the VHD size it takes either much time or a lot of time. You must take this fact into account, when you develop your backup and recovery concept.
• Make sure that you enabled the option in the restore job settings to overwrite the existing VM. If you don't enable the option and you do have a VM with the same name existing on your Hyper-V node, Backup Exec 2010 restore job fails only after the whole data is written back from the tape to the Hyper-V node and the VM is going to be registered in Hyper-V. The correction the failure and a new run of the restore job cost time.
• Pay attention to the free space of the system drive (usually C:) of the Hyper-V node, which Backup Exec chosen as target to recover to, because the standard restore path points to the system drive.
• After the restore has finished you should review the hardware settings of the restored VM, especially if you restored from one Hyper-V failover cluster to a different one. This check includes such things like network name and the VLAN id and may be RAM and CPU settings too.
• After the restored VM is up you must check the network settings inside of the VM to be sure, it has network access after the restoration.