Citrix VDI with PvDisk and NetApp Best Practices - Part III Restore

Hi All,

Here it is, the long awaited completion of the Backup and Recovery saga.  As before, remember to try this in your development environment and not in production!  Use at your own RISK!

One of your users calls you up and tells you that they had all their data on their PvDisk and they accidentally erased some of it.  Now, before you go rushing off and restore the whole thing, we've got a few questions we need to ask!
1.  Has the user added new data to his/her PvDisk since the last backup?
2.  If yes, can they save it to another location before you do the restore?
3.  If no, the restore will take more time, can they wait? (I'll explain)

With the NetApp VSC you can restore the entire virtual machines, individual disks, or individual files.  I'll walk you through these.

The easiest is to restore an entire machine. 

1.  Log into Virtual Center, find the machine, right click it, select NetApp > Backup and Recovery > Restore

2.  Next select the snapshot/backup you'd like to restore.
 

3.   Choose the entire virtual machine and Restart VM.  This will overwrite the entire virtual machine and roll back all changes to when the snapshot/backup was taken.  Be careful with this because any changes made after the backup will be GONE!

4.  Once you're happy with the choices you've made, review the summary and finish the restore.

The virtual machine will now be restored!  Now if you only want to restore certain datastores, you would go back to VM Component Selection and select only the datastore you wanted to restore.

Now what if you wanted individual files?  Here you would right click the machine, select NetApp > Backup and Recovery > Mount

This is where things get really cool!  Notice in the screen shot you select the snapshot/backup you want and it also has listed all the virtual machines in that backup.  Since all of those machines are in the volume and the magic happens at the volume level, you can restore any files from any of those machines.  So what happens next?  After you mount this datastore there are a number of things you can do.  It's given a unique identifier to not confuse ESXi that there are duplicate datastores mounted.  You can now browse the datastore, for VMware files or edit the settings of the original desktop or ANY desktop and mount up the backed up VMDK as a new hard drive on the desktop!  How cool is that?!  I love this feature!!  Grab the files your user needs and than remove the hard drive and un-mount the temporary datastore.

There's more you can do, but this is a quick glimpse of the restore power of VSC.  I hope the wait of this blog was worth it, and if not, well than too bad.  :-)

Until Next Time!