To help you understand how a limited self-service restore session works, imagine that you are a VMware administrator and you must restore a failed disk on your virtual machine with the help of a Backup and Recovery administrator.
It is Thursday afternoon and one of the files on the virtual machine is corrupt. You must restore the disk over the weekend. You complete a ticket and request access to another workstation so that you can recover the data from a backup copy.
A Virtual Storage Console administrator responds to your ticket and makes the system available from Saturday morning for 48 hours. The SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure server sends you an email message that provides information you need to log in as an administrator to the Virtual Storage Console computer, a link to a site from which you can download Restore Agent application software, and a configuration file.
The configuration file contains attached disks so that your operating system can see which disks are attached and assign drive letters that enable your workstation to connect to that of the Virtual Storage Console administrator.
Create a limited self-service restore session
Before you can restore a failed disk on your virtual machine, you must create a restore session that a user can use to access a guest operating system for restoring a virtual machine disk file.
Before you begin
Unless you log in as an administrator, you must have the appropriate RBAC privileges correctly assigned to complete this task successfully. For more information, see Authentication and user management with vCenter RBAC and Data ONTAP RBAC on page 32.
Before creating a restore session, you must gather the information necessary to complete the Add Single File Restore Session wizard:
• The name or IP address of the virtual machine: the backup source and destination
• The email message recipient and sender
• The mount expiration time: three hours About this task
In this example, the source virtual machine and the destination virtual machine are the same.
Steps
1. Select the Single File Restore panel.
2. From the Single File Restore panel, click Add to start the Add Single File Restore Session wizard.
3. Complete the wizard, using the following values:
• Source VM Name: VM-WXP-EXAMPLE
• Destination VM Name: VM-WXP-EXAMPLE
• To Email Address(s): [email protected]
• From Email Address: [email protected]
• Mount Expiration: 3 days
• File Restore Access Type: Limited Self-Service
4. Confirm the details of the restore session and then click Finish to complete the wizard.
Result
Your new restore session is listed in the Single File Restore panel.
After you finish
You receive an email notification that contains a link to download Restore Agent, and you install the software.
Installing Restore Agent
After you create a restore session, you receive an email message that provides a link to the Restore Agent installation file and has a restore session configuration attached as an .sfr file. Before you can restore single files on a guest operating system, you must install Restore Agent.
Before you begin
The system upon which you are going to install Restore Agent must have the following software installed:
• Microsoft Management Console 3.0
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1
In addition, to enable the single file restore feature for an NFS datastore and perform a mount operation, the storage system must have an installed FlexClone license.
For the most current software requirements, see the Interoperability Matrix at mysupport.netapp.com/
matrix.
Steps
1. Click the link in the email message to download and start the installation process.
2. Follow the displayed instructions.
Recovering single files from a virtual machine
After you have been given access to files on the destination virtual machine, you can use the Restore Agent window to view the backed up files created by Virtual Storage Console and find the ones that you need to restore from.
Before you begin
When you are restoring data, Restore Agent displays the first-available disk drive letter. If your guest operating system is Windows XP, 7, or 8, you must to go to the Windows Disk Management snap-in application to manually assign the disk drive letter to other partitioned space on the disk. For more information about using the disk management utility, select Help from Disk Management.
Steps
1. From the Restore Agent window, select a file from the Disk tab.
Alternatively, click the Backup tab to find the Snapshot copy by name.
2. Right-click the name of the backup copy and select Mount.
The Backup tab shows the drive letter for each backup copy only if the source virtual machine and destination virtual machine are the same.
The contents of the backup copy are written to the new location.
After you finish
After finishing this task, you should clear the configuration cache.
Clear the configuration
After restoring your data from a backed up virtual machine, you should clear the configuration so you can upload another one later.
Steps
1. From the Action pane in the Restore Agent window, click Clear Configuration.
2. In the resulting window, click OK.
Backup and restore metadata will be removed from Restore Agent and Virtual Storage Console.