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Nutanix Data Protection – Restore your data

November 4, 2014

In my previous “Nutanix Data Protection – Secure your data” found here i discussed how you can use Nutanix Prism to create Nutanix snapshots of your virtual machines (VMs). In this blog post i’ll take you through the process of restoring the VMs to a VMware vSphere environment.

I’ll show you two separate use cases:

  1. Restore a VM
  2. Clone a VM

Restore

This option is used when you need to replace the existing VM with the one form a Nutanix snapshot or create a VM from a Nutanix snapshot when the original VM has been deleted.

Use the following steps to perform a restore.

  • Select Data Protection form the Prism menu.
    Screen Shot 2014-09-29 at 12.53.42
  • Click the Table tab.
  • Click the Protection Domain name, in my case i’ll use the Protection Domain i created for the Secure your data blog post called “app-test-01”.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 11.18.51
  • Click the VMs link to get an overview of the VMs in the Protection Domain.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 11.19.47
  • In this case i want to restore the mssql02 VM.
  • Click the Local Snapshots link to explore your available Nutanix snapshots.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 11.21.42
  • Hover the Details link next to the snapshot you want to use to verify the VM you want to restore is included in the Nutanix snapshot.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 11.22.44
  • Click the Restore link next to the Nutanix snapshot you want to use as the restore source.
  • Select the VM you want to restore.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 11.25.56
  • You’ll have to verify that you want to overwrite the existing VM.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 15.07.52
    If the original VM doesn’t exists you will not get the confirmation popup since you’ll only create a new VM and not overwrite an existing one.
  • The restored virtual machine will be placed in the same vCenter Server vSphere Cluster Resource Pool in the Hosts and Clusters view and in the same vCenter Server directory in the VMs and Templates view as where the original VM was placed.

Clone

The other option is to create a clone of an existing VM form a Nutanix snapshot. I can see two really good use cases for this option.

  1. You need a previous state of the VM since your running VM contains changes X compared to the Nutanix snapshot and now you want to stand up a new version and implement changes Y compared to the Nutanix snapshot.
  2. You want to restore e.g. a file from the VM Nutanix snapshot state.

Follow the same procedure as described for the restore option until you reach the “Restore Snapshot”. Instead of using the Restore option you select the Clone option according to the below figure.

  • You need to specify a Datastore directory to which you want to restore your VM. In my case i used the date_number-vm_name naming convention.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 14.47.31
  • Before we restored the VM the NFS Datastore included the following directories.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 14.55.52
  • After the Clone we have the following directories.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 14.56.14
  • The Clone is place in the “Discovered virtual machine”  directory in the vCenter Server VMs & Templates view and in the vSphere Cluster root resource pool (the vSphere Cluster itself) in the Hosts and Clusters view.
    Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 14.55.35
    Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 15.21.40

Now you are able to perform the required changes to your clone or maybe restore files form the clone to the original VM.

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  1. Nutanix Data Protection – Secure your data | VCDX56

    November 4, 2014 at 3:46 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment

    […] This blog post describes how you can restore your data. […]

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