SMVI Concerns

[lutzadmins]

We currently are running SMVI 2.1 and i have a couple questions and concerns.  Just recently we had to restore a file from a VM and were not successful.  For starters, nobody told us we needed Flexclose to be licensed (strike one) so we couldn't do a single file restore.  If we have a large VMDK file that we need to mount somewhere it takes forever to copy that file to a place so we can do that (Strike two).  I certaonly don't want to strike out here so here is a question.  If i restore teh entire VMDK file to the current VM is it going to overwrite the existing VMDK file that is alreads there or does it create another disk on the VM??  I have a VM that has  a lot of changing data that i cannot lose but from time to time i may need to do single file restores.  How can i accomplish this without flexclone??  I'm not too concerned about restoring the entire VM, i can do that manually if i need to but how can i retrieve single files an easy way?  Any thoughts comments or suggestions are welcome.  Sorry if this is in the wrong forum.  Thanks

[ChrisHolloway]

What protocol are you using to connect to your datastores?  NFS, or FCP/iSCSI?

[lutzadmins]

NFS

[keitha]

So this is a bit of a tough one. Technically you need FlexClone to do file level restores with SMVI (VSC). You said SMVI 2.1 but I assume you mean VSC 2.1? Regardless I would recommend upgrading to VSC 2.1.2 which is the most current and has some important bug fixes.

You should have been told that SFR required FlexClone but what is done is done. What we are working on is a version of VSC that allows for the SFR process which does not require FlexClone. More specifically a version of FlexClone just for VSC (which is free). The problem is I don't know when that might be.

If you do a VMDK restore, it will in fact restore over the existing VMDK which you don't want, so don't do that.

You can try to mount the VMDK from the snapshot as an additional disk if you set that disk to be non persistent mode. This used to work in ESX 3.5 days but I am not sure if it still works in 4/5. I could not make it work in a 5.0 environment a few months ago.

I am sure the account team could get you a temp license for FlexClone. What version of ONTAP are you on?

Keith

[lutzadmins]

Thanks Keith,

I'm  running VSC 2.1.1.  As for mounting the VMDK, i believe the snapshot folders are locked down and read only  Is there a simple way to make them writeable then change it back in the event i need to do this again?  Our prod storage is actually an IBM N3600 and it's running ONTAP 7.3.3 and out DRF site is a fas2020 running ONTAP 7.3.5.  Thanks for the reply.  Any other thoughts?? 

On a side note, is there a way to make the .snapshot folder visable so that virtual center can see it to mount a VMDK?  I'm having to move the files to separate locations to try and restore files and they take a long time to move.  If there is an easy way to make it visable and put it back to normal that would make things a lot easier.  Thanks