Restoring single files from VMs via array based snapshots

First a brief introduction for disaster recovery for VMware.  EMC has a range of DR products to help protect your virtual environment and meet DR needs for recovery time and points.  All EMC storage arrays have built in snapshotting capabilties.  Replication Manager is a product that has been around for a while at EMC that has the abiltity to schedule snapshots and integrate far up the stack all the way through applications.  This provides the ability to have application consistent backups via arrays similar to how traditional backup applications would accomplish DR.  In RM's case for VMware, we are focusing here on its ability to integrate with VMware and enable the automation for scheduling, the mounting of snapshots, and the operating system integration to ensure a consistent file system.  So if the question is does EMC integrate with VMware for snapshot capabilities from an array perspective?  Yes, RM integrates to VMware and works with all of our arrays to provide VMware integrated DR capabilities and has for a while.  Now to the meat..

An important update has been released to the EMC Replication Manager product with the latest version of 5.3.1 that is important for VMware environments.  You now have the ability to recover single files by mounting VMDKs via an RM wizard to the RM proxy server.  This will allow the quick recovery of single files within VMDK files when leveraging array based snapshots for disaster recovery purposes of your VMware environment.

Updated videos of RM with NFS and VMFS to come.

In the past if leveraging array based snapshots for the first line of defense in the disaster recovery of individual files of a VM there were a few options.

The first option is to leverage VMware natively to mount the VMDK that contains the files to be recovered as an additional drive to a VM.  The first step here is actually mounting the datastore that contains the VMDK.  RM can automate this process and make datastores snapshots available right away or on demand depending on the needs.  If you have RM set to allow for manual mounting, then you need to tell RM to mount it to your ESX cluster.  If the snap is already available, then you can simply browse to the datastore that contains the VMDK file, and mount it up to a VM and you’re good to go.  Boot the VM, and grab the files that you require.

There are also ways without VMware.  If you are leveraging NFS datastores, you can actually mount them and their snapshotted datastores as CIFS shares.  From there you have native access to the VMDK’s and can use tools to open the VMDKs and extract the files you are looking to recover.

And lastly, on the file based recovery discussion there is Avamar or other agent/agentless backup utilities.  If running Avamar with an agent in the VM you can easily open the agent and recover any files without needing array based snapshots.  If you are running in an agentless Avamar scenario, you can run the Avamar administrator tool from another system and remotely recover a file and point the target of the recovery to the relevant system.