Many organizations use storage snapshots for data protection. Storage snapshots allow for very low RPO: they have minimal impact on storage performance and can be created really fast. Administrators can take snapshots several times a day or even schedule them as often as every hour.
However, in the virtual environment storage snapshots add more difficulty to the restore process. Storage snapshots are created per volume. A volume typically holds disks of multiple VMs. For this reason, restore from storage snapshots is not a simple rollback operation: it is a multi-task process. To restore a VM from the storage snapshot manually, you typically need to perform the following actions:
- Present the storage snapshot to an ESX(i) host.
- Perform an HBA rescan.
- Mount the storage snapshot to the ESX(i) host.
- Browse the storage snapshot to locate the VM files (VMDK).
- Add the VM to the inventory or copy the VM files to another VMFS datastore.
- Power on the VM.
- Perform cleanup operations after recovery is completed.
If you need to restore guest OS files and application objects from the VM on a storage snapshot, the procedure will be even more complicated. As a result, the restore process takes much time.
To make VM recovery from storage snapshots fast and easy, Veeam Backup Free Edition offers Veeam Explorer™ for Storage Snapshots. Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots is a new technology in Veeam Backup Free Edition that lets you restore VMware VM data directly from storage snapshots on HP 3PAR StoreServ, HP StoreVirtual and NetApp. Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots has been designed and developed in collaboration with HP and NetApp and uses native means of these storage systems for restore.
Veeam Explorer™ for Storage Snapshots offers a variety of restore options:
- You can restore an entire VM.
- You can restore VM guest OS files (Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and other).
- You can restore Microsoft Active Directory objects from virtualized Microsoft Active Directory servers.
- You can restore Microsoft Exchange objects from virtualized Microsoft Exchange servers.
- You can restore Microsoft SharePoint objects from virtualized Microsoft SharePoint servers.
- You can restore Microsoft SQL Server database from virtualized Microsoft SQL Servers.
Related Topics
Working with Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots
