Migrating a Restored VM Off Alike Internal SR


Problem: After running a instant restore of a VM protected by Alike, you need to migrate it to production storage

Solution: Using Xen Storage Move to migrate the VM's disks to your production SR


Running an instant restore or instaboot job is a very fast and convenient way to restore VMs. However, after the restore is complete, it's best practice to migrate off the Alike internal SR to your production Xen storage. You can envision the Alike SR as a "spare tire" emergency system to help you get out of a sticky situation. But for the best safety and performance going forward, we recommend migrating off this SR as soon as possible. Your production SRs likely have larger capacities and better scalability. Furthermore, should your Alike VM require maintenance, such as a scheduled update or accidental reboot, this will bring down any VMs running on its SR.

After instabooting a VM, you will see a screen like this in Alike:



Simply open XenCenter and click on the VM's storage tab. Then use the "move" button to migrate off the Alike SR:


Repeat this step for each disk of your VM. Once this process is complete, feel free to clean up your instaboot area using the "Cleanup" button on your A3 instaboot page.