SMVI restore times

[belgianbiscuit]

Hi all,

I am restoring a production VM and since we are actually still evaluating SMVI we don't really know what to expect.
During testing I restored a 20Gb VM (no vm snapshots) in about 8 minutes. The datastore I used was not being used by anything else.

We ran into a situation were a production VM got corrupted and we happened to have a backup (local snapshot)
I am restoring a 40Gb VM now and it seems to take a long time (or maybe my expectations are to high :-))

It has been going for an hour and has not finished. Seems long in comparisson with the tests we did. Obviously it is restoring now
to a datastore hosting our production VMs.

When you restore with SMVI does it all happen internally to the filers or is there data that needs to go over network somehow? How does the process actually work?
Please excuse my ignorance

Cheers

[shanmug]

Hi

When you restore with SMVI does it all happen internally to the filers or is there data that needs to go over network somehow?

No not everything is internal. There are times in which it has to transfer data over network. And it depeds on type of datastore and type of restore.

If VM is in VMFS datastore then it does a mount operation and uses ESX's datastore copy operation where it might have data trasfer over network. Between ESX and ESX to storage array.

How does the process actually work?

1.Power off running VMs

2. Setup storage clones related to VM

3. Mount the storage clones as datastores.

4. Restore all VM realted files from cloned datastore to actual datastore(Type of copy depends on  type of restore and datastore that is being performed)

5. Reload VM

6. Playback the VMware snapshot if one was taken during the backup

7. Delete the VMware snapshot.

8. Monitor all file copy operations. Once all done flag as Restore done.

Time take during restore doesn't just depend on only storage realted tasks. Reverting to old VMware snapshot and deleting leads to virtual disk consolidation process.

This disk consolidation process takes lot of time depends on the size of the delta disks. Please gothrough our  Best Practice Guide for Vmware Snapshot related inforamtion.

Hope it helps.