About removing an instantly recovered Hyper-V virtual machine

Last published : Apr 02, 2026
You should remove an instantly recovered virtual machine from the Backup Exec server storage after it has been migrated or when you no longer need to use it. Removing an instantly recovered virtual machine cleans all database entries and all folders that are created at the time of the instant recovery job.
If you remove the virtual machine from the Hyper-V host using the Hyper-V manager, you should still remove the instantly recovered virtual machine from the Backup Exec. When you remove an instantly recovered virtual machine from the Hyper-V host, the configuration and the checkpoint folders are deleted from the Hyper-V storage and the SMB share that was created for the instantly recovered virtual machine on the Backup Exec server is also removed.
When you run the Remove a Recovered VM job, Backup Exec checks the storage status of the disks, and then unregisters the virtual machine from the Hyper-V host.
The following disk status scenarios are possible:
  • If all disks of the instantly recovered virtual machine are still running on the Backup Exec storage, Backup Exec first unregisters that virtual machine from the Hyper-V host and then proceeds with the removal process.
  • If none of the virtual machines disks are running on the Backup Exec storage, Backup Exec proceeds with the removal process. The virtual machine is still available even after the remove operation and you can delete the virtual machine from the Hyper-V manager.
  • If some of the disks are still running on the Backup Exec storage and some disks have been moved to a permanent storage, the Remove a Recovered VM job fails. You can either move all disks from the Backup Exec storage and then re-run the job or you can check the Remove the virtual machine even though disks are on both Backup Exec server storage and the virtual machine host check box if you do not want to save the changes.
  • If the Hyper-V Replica feature is enabled on the instantly recovered virtual machine, the remove job fails. You can remove replication for this virtual machine and then run the job again.
  • If the instantly recovered virtual machine migration is in progress, you can run the job again when the migration is over.
    Note: Data lifecycle management (DLM) is postponed for the backup set that was used to create the instantly recovered virtual machine until you remove the virtual machine. The next cycle of DLM expires the backup set.