In this post I will go through a step by step deployment of configuring and testing Nutanix’s native Self Service Restore utility included in the Professional and Ultimate licenses tiers of the Acropolis software. The topic of discussion will be Windows file-level recovery.
General Requirements and Limitations of Self-Service Restore
- Set disk.enableUUID=true in the .vmx file for the VMs on ESXi.
- Guest VM must have configured Nutanix snapshots by adding VM to a protection domain. Self-service restore is not supported for the snapshots that you take from the VM table view.
- vStore protection domains are not supported.
- Volume groups are not supported.
- Snapshots that are created in AOS 4.5 or later releases are only supported.
- IDE/SCSI disks are only supported. SATA, PCI, and delta disks are not supported.
Requirements and Limitations for VMs Running Windows Operating System
- Ensure that sufficient logical drive letters are available to bring the disk online.
- File Systems. Dynamic disks comprising of NTFS on simple volumes, spanned volumes, striped volumes, mirrored volumes, and RAID-5 volumes are not supported.
- Only 64-bit operating system is supported.
- Following operating systems are supported.
- Windows Server 2008 R2 or later versions
- Windows 7 through Windows 10
Above Requirements and Limitations Reference from the following LINK
Testing Nutanix Self-Service Restore
Before we begin we must make sure the following is completed for the VM which you will be testing SSR.
- NGT (Nutanix Guest Tools) is installed on the VM described in this post…Installing Nutanix Guest Tools on Windows
- VMs are configured in a Protection Domain as described in this post…Configuring Nutanix Protection Domain
1. With the above requirements completed, log into the Windows VM as a Domain or Local administrator and validate that the SSR icon is on the Desktop.
2. Find the file you will be testing with or create one. For this test I created a small text file to use to show the restore capability of SSR.
3. Now make sure you have a recent snapshot which includes this new file. To do this, login to the SSR portal by double-clicking the SSR icon on the Desktop and login as the Administrator.
4. If you see no recent Snapshots that were taken prior to the file that will be tested with follow steps 5-7 to manually create a snapshot. If you have one then move on to Step 8.
5. Login to Prism and go to Data Protection. Then select the Protection Domain and click ‘Take Snapshot‘.
6. Determine your retention policy and this needs to be LOCAL in order for NGT to use the snapshot for the SSR capability. Hit ‘Save‘.
7. After you hit Save you should see a new Local Snapshot shortly after. Verify you see the new snapshot.
8. With a snapshot available we can delete the test file.
For added measure I deleted from the Recycle Bin too. 🙂
9. Now in SSR we can select the snapshot and mount it.
Wait for it to mount. Status “mounting”…
10. Now that we see the snapshot disk as mounted we see a new Drive in Windows. In the below example I see drive letter G:
11. If we navigate Windows Explorer we can now drill down into the snapshot drive and find the missing files that need to be restored.
12. Restore all the files that either needed to be reverted to a previous time or were missing!! 🙂
I hope this helps visually explain the process of using the native Nutanix snapshot feature to restore files using Nutanix Self Service Restore. As always please leave comments for any questions/comments/concerns!
