This paper documents the configuration and tools that can be used to perform recovery of single files from NetApp SnapShots of VMware virtual machines within NFS datastores. A variety of configurations, tools, and techniques can be used to accomplish these tasks for both Microsoft Windows and Linux Guest Operating Systems. This paper will focus on tools that are freely available, and can be enhanced with custom scripting, to help automate the processes around single file recovery in a VMware environment that uses NFS datastores.
The full documentation (VMware_Single_File_Recovery_1.3.pdf) around configuring your system for and performing single file recovery with VMware virtual machines on NFS datastores is attached to this post. The VMDKMounter for Windows (VMDKmounter2.1zip) and Linux (vmdkmounter_linux2.3.zip) scripts that are discussed in this document are also attached to this post.
NOTE: Starting with vmdkmounter_linux version 2.3, you must pass in the path to the folder/directory of the virtual machine that you are restoring from. Previous versions required the full path to the actual “-flat.vmdk” file, but that is not allowed starting with version 2.3. This was done to support Linux logical volumes that span multiple VMDK files. See the documentation for example usage.
NOTE: Starting with vmdkmounter_linux version 3.0, support for clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) 8.2 and higher is included.
Files
VMDKmounter2.1_msi - VMDKMounter for Windows install file. (Rename to .msi after download)
VMware_Single_File_Recovery_1.3.pdf - Documentation.
README.txt - Information about VMDKMounter for Linux.
vmdkmounter - The linux executable.
vmdkmounter_pl - The linux Perl source code. (Rename to .pl)