Data Recovery Tales: Get Help For VM Recovery

[DonB]

Terrible article. No mention that the customer should have been backing up VMs in the first place or any indication on how to (1)backup VMware guests.

VM backup is not only possible its not that hard. When it comes to VMware, I don't care if you're using Workstation, (2)ESXi or (3)Fusion, there's no excuse not to have at least one application consistent backup per week per guest.

RAID as has been said here and many other places for many years is not backup. And the focus on backup is almost backwards, what we really care about is "restores". Restore is something that must be tested which is something virtualized environments are tailored made to do in a bubble without disturbing production.

(1) vStorage API for ESXi and I leverage vmrun in Fusion ( /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmrun)
(2) Professionally I backup well over 400 guests daily
(3) I backup my home lab once a week via a shell script

 

[thiggins]

Backup was not the point of the article.

 

[DonB]

I re-read the article just to be sure. I stand by my comments.

When VM and Data Recovery are mentioned in the same breathe, one can safely presume we are talking about (1)backup and recovery of guests when VMware is the hypervisor. I'll concede that data recovery also refers to getting data off failed drives/RAID arrays. I guess the headline should have been less ambiguous to start with.

A second time through the article and this statement bothers me even more than the first time through, "...VMWare had been upgraded several times. Theoretically, virtual disk image files should be compatible. But in practice, this didn't work." While this might have been true in this particular case, I have my doubts. I've successfully resurrected corrupt virtual images that originated from GSX server and VMware server 1.0 to later run them on current versions ESXi (and in one case, Workstation).

The whole thing bugs me, it's just another tale of woe when you use RAID as backup when RAID isn't backup. Virtual Machines per se have nothing to do with this article IMO.

(1) http://www.vmware.com/products/data-recovery/overview.html

 

[Spock83]

It is just a example. The article could been without VM. So what.

I'm curious. How ReclaiMe can see crushed RAID field? If I take hard drives from NAS (ext4, RAID5) and install directly in PC, will that work? (If is simple logical damage).

 

[ReclaiMe]

DonB,

They should have been backing up their virtual machines, but for this or that reason, they did not. People who do back ups, are rarely in a need of our assistance.

And, secondly, having a virtual machine images on the filesystem, more specifically having several filesystems nested one into another, greatly complicates data recovery.

Spock83,

There are several scenarios, from less to more complicated. In any case you will need a spare storage to put the files to, or to put the destriped copy to. Then, you put your NAS drives to the PC, determine the parameters and choose between making a sector-by-sector copy of a RAID (full size), or extracting file-by-file.