Instant VM Recovery is the quickest method to migrate the server. This technology runs the physical server as a virtual machine directly from the backup file on the repository, which is presented to the ESXi host via the vPower NFS service. The server can be powered on and become operational within minutes, irrespective of the large volume sizes (1TB and 4TB). The full migration of the virtual machine's disks to the production datastore can then be finalized in the background using VMware Storage vMotion or Veeam Quick Migration while the server is running, thus minimizing downtime.

A. Bare metal recovery requires restoring all 5TB+ of data to the new empty VM before it can be powered on, making it a very slow process.
B. Instant Disk Recovery is a granular process for individual disks and is not the most efficient, integrated method for migrating an entire server system.
C. Exporting disks involves a full data read from the backup and write to the destination, converting the data to VMDK files, which is time-consuming before the VM can even be created. ---

1. Veeam Backup & Replication 12.1 User Guide for VMware vSphere

"Instant Recovery"

p. 638.

"Instant Recovery allows you to quickly recover a VM

physical machine

or cloud VM into your virtualization environment. When you perform Instant Recovery

Veeam Backup & Replication uses the Veeam vPower technology to run a recovered machine directly from a compressed and deduplicated backup file. Since there is no need to extract the machine from the backup file and copy it to the production storage

you can recover a machine of any size in minutes."

2. Veeam Backup & Replication 12.1 User Guide for VMware vSphere

"How Instant VM Recovery Works"

p. 639.

"Veeam Backup & Replication creates a vPower NFS datastore on the Veeam backup server and mounts the machine disks from the backup file to the ESXi host as a regular datastore... The machine is started directly from the backup file."

3. Veeam Agent Management Guide 12.1

"Recovery from Backups of Physical Machines"

p. 211.

"You can use backups of physical machines created with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows... to perform the following recovery operations in Veeam Backup & Replication: Instant Recovery to a VMware vSphere VM." This confirms the compatibility of the source backup type with the chosen recovery method.