Restoring Larger Virtual Machines

[menzies]

We have been discussing a challenge that I wanted to throw out to the wider community.  The challenge is what is the best method to restore a large (VMware) virtual machine?

Some context:

• 7-Mode 8.x environment
• vSphere 5
• Virtual machines up or over 1.5TB in size

The customer is using VSC but when restoring the VM it is taking a very long time, consuming a lot of resource on the controller and they have had the restore fail.

Our understanding is that the VSC process is using SFSR so essentially doing a copy which is why it takes so long.  A couple of suggestions that have been put forward:

• Using Storage VMotion to speed the process.  If anyone has recent references to this and / or experience it would be useful
• Manually use sisclone to do it

Both methods are outside VSC which is a shame, but if anyone does have practical experience of either approach or another we would be keen to hear.

Many thanks

Craig Menzies

[dburkland]

I have ran into similar issues before and have done the following to restore larger VMs:

• Mount the VSC backup of the VM's datastore
• Remove the bad copy of the VM from the VMware inventory (You can delete it as it is useless at this point)
• Browse into the mounted VSC backup datastore and import the VM into the inventory
• Power on the VM and validate that it is working properly
• Storage vMotion the VM back to its original datastore
• Unmount the VSC backup datastore

This process seemed to work well however we were using 10GbE-connected NFS datastores. Hopefully in the future VSC will be able to perform sisclone operations for any restore jobs.

Hope this helps,

Dan

[menzies]

Dan, thank you for the quick reply.

Good to hear someone as worked through this process.