Low Level Restore Procedures The following sections describe how to recover virtual machines and restore virtual disk data. Restoring a Virtual Machine and Disk Restore Incremental Backup Data Restoring a Virtual Machine and DiskYou cannot get write access to a virtual disk that is in active use. For a full restore, you first must ensure that the virtual disk is not in use by halting the parent virtual machine, then performing the “power off” sequence. The following code sample demonstrates how to “power off” a Virtual Machine: Restore Incremental Backup DataRestore with Direct Connection to ESXi HostSometimes you must restore a virtual machine directly to an ESXi host, for example in disaster recovery when vCenter Server runs on ESXi as a virtual machine. A new vSphere 5 feature tries to prevent this if the ESXi host is managed by vCenter. To circumvent this and restore the virtual machine, you must first disassociate the host from vCenter. In earlier releases, vCenter management had less state but was revocable only from vCenter.Parent topic: Backing Up Virtual Disks in vSphere