Recovery not backup

Yesterday's post highlighted that data protection's real value lies not in how we backup, but rather how quickly and easily we can recover. Using the power of DataGravity's DiscoveryPoints, files and folders can restored in seconds while also empowering IT professionals to offer self-service recovery of data to their end users. These capabilities are built natively into the data intelligence process, so there is no need to wait for legacy data copying or migration, no data rehydration process, no proxy servers, no loading of tapes in order to recover.

WHAT about Virtual Machines

DataGravity DiscoveryPoints fully integrate with VM infrastructure to offer the same recovery capabilities to virtual machines and their data, that is offered to SMB files shares, NFS mounts and iSCSI volumes. In fact, DiscoveryPoints offer per-VM data protection so you can get very granular with your approach. Let's look at at two simple use cases: 1.) A entire deleted VM needs to be recovered and 2.) A file or folder needs to be recovered within a VM.

RESTORING A VM

To recover a deleted or retired VM, utilizing DataGravity DiscoveryPoints, is simply a matter of finding the VM on the Manage VMs Screen, selecting the appropriate DiscoveryPoint to restore to, and performing the restore.

The Manage VMs screen allows you to see all the virtual machines and their details including the current status. DataGravity's intelligence architecture, not only has visibility on virtual machines that are part of the VM infrastructure inventory, but also those virtual machines that have been removed or deleted from the inventory. This provides us with the ability to recover any virtual machine files, regardless of it's status.

DiscoveryPoints allow us to select the point in time that we want to restore to, and then confirm in this case we want to bring the entire virtual machine back into the infrastructure.

Once confirmed the virtual machine is once again registered back into the virtual machine infrastructure and can be powered back online. This recovery process could have also recovered a single virtual machine file (vmdk, vmx, etc.) rather then recovering the entire VM.

RESTORING FILES WITHIN A VM

One of the most frustrating data recovery challenges IT administrators face is recovering files embedded in virtual machines. This often requires identifying candidate VM backups that might contain the version of the file that is being sought, recovering the VM into the production environment, booting the VM, and opening the targeted file to confirm it is the correct version. Once the file is found from across these multiple VM backups, it then needs to be copied back into the production VM. That process is complex, may require multiple IT teams to accomplish, resulting in longer recovery times.

In contrast, with DataGravity, search for the file name within the VM, preview across the file versions for the given file, and then instantly recover the file into the running virtual machine. In this use case we will delete and recover a single file running within a Virtual Desktop.

Once it is determined that a file, folder or multiple files need to be recovered back into a virtual machine we can simply go initiate the recovery. DataGravity provides insights on a per-VM basis, so it is easy to see that activity, performance, status, and details for this particular virtual desktop including it's DiscoveryPoints.

Browsing all of the Deleted Files for this virtual desktop, and filtering by File Name, Owner and Date allows us to quickly find the file that was deleted.