A customer has a local VMware environment that they back up locally and offload all retention to Wasabi’s Cloud. The local backups have become…

Instant VM Recovery allows a virtual machine to be started and run directly from a backup file located in the Wasabi object storage. Veeam's vPower technology mounts the backup file to a local VMware ESXi host via a mount server, making the VM available for user interaction within minutes. Data is transferred from Wasabi on-demand as it is accessed. This method provides the fastest possible Recovery Time Objective (RTO) because it eliminates the need to download the entire VM data before powering it on, which would be required for a full restore.

A. Instant Recovery to EC2 VM: This is a cross-platform restore to a different cloud environment (AWS), not the fastest method to recover to the existing local VMware infrastructure.

B. Restore Entire VM to local VMware VM: This option requires transferring the entire VM's data from Wasabi back to the local datastore before the VM can be started, resulting in a significantly longer RTO.

C. Instant Recovery to Wasabi Cloud VM: Wasabi is an object storage service provider and does not offer the compute infrastructure required to run virtual machines directly.

1. Veeam Backup & Replication v12 User Guide for VMware vSphere: In the "Instant Recovery for VMware vSphere" section

it states

"Instant Recovery allows you to almost immediately restore a VM into your production environment by running it directly from a backup file... You can use Instant Recovery to restore VMs from backups located in a performance tier

capacity tier or archive tier of a scale-out backup repository." This confirms that recovery directly from object storage (like Wasabi

used in a capacity tier) is a primary use case.

2. Veeam Backup & Replication v12 User Guide for VMware vSphere: The "How Instant VM Recovery Works" section details the process: "Veeam Backup & Replication uses the Veeam vPower technology to run a recovered VM directly from a compressed and deduplicated backup file... Veeam Backup & Replication publishes the content of the backup file as an iSCSI target on a mount server." This mechanism is what enables the near-zero RTO.

3. Veeam Backup & Replication v12 What's New Document: This document highlights "Direct to object storage" capabilities

including "High-performance restores of any backup directly from object storage

" which encompasses Instant VM Recovery. This feature enhancement in V12 is specifically designed for scenarios like the one described in the question.