Snap Restore from a snapvault snapshot

[VIRTUALGEEK2]

hello fellow geeks,

I have two FAS instances, one if production and the other backup. all of production is being replicated with snapvault to the backup FAS. The data consists of datastore volumes being presented to vmware, iSCSI luns being presented to physical and virtual servers directly and as datastores and CIFS.

i have two similar questions:

1:) I have a requirement to restore a single file from an application servers which is a virtual machine but uncertain on how to achieve this without having to attach the NFS share to a host, attaching the VMDK to a server and copying the file off. How does one do this?

2:) I need to restore another file from an iSCSI volume but dont want to go through the whole process of setting up initiators, is there an easier way?

thanks,

VG

[georgevj]

Hi,

If I have understood the question correctly, there is no way to do this from storage side. You must do this from the host itself. The reason is that, be it a VMDK virtual disk on VMware datastore or an iSCSI or FC LUN created on netApp storage controlelr, they are (VMDK and LUN) treated as "single files" at Data ONTAP level. ONTAP does not "know" what is inside them. NetApp would not be able to read the filesystems inside these virtual devices. That means even if you are using single file snap restore, we will be able to restore these as a whole unit. Only a host OS can read and restore files inside the VMDK and LUNs.

[VIRTUALGEEK2]

That is what I am after. so if it cannot be done from the FAS level would it be best to configure a Windows Server 2012 with NFS or present the volume as a readonly datastore back to the VMware infrastructure, one can then attach the VMDK to a VM and recover the file?