NetApp VSC 4.1 Series - Part 5/7: Restoring Datastore Contents

Here we accidentally delete the contents of datastore via the vSphere Client and have to recover it. In the example below, we have the LONNFSVOL3 datastore - which contains 2 VMs - and all the contents of the datastore will be deleted.
Note: It’s not possible to delete an NFS datastore via the vSphere client, only unmount.

Image: LONNFSVOL3 datastore

Image: LONNFSVOL3 datastore after deleting the contents (.snapshot cannot be deleted as read only)

vSphere Client > Home > Solutions and Applications > NetApp
Backup and Recovery > Restore
- Click the ‘Refresh’ button in the top right to display the available backups
- Select the backup we want to restore from
- Right-click the entity we want to restore and select ‘Restore’ and the ‘Virtual Machine Restore’ window pops up

Image: VSC 4.1 > Backup and Recovery > Restore > Restore (Datastore Entity)

Restore Entity
- Are you sure? Click Yes

Image: VSC 4.1 Restore (Datastore) Entity warning prompt

And wait for the contents of the Datastore to be to the original datastore!

The End!

IMPORTANT NOTE: What’s interesting here is that the contents of the datastore are copied into the original volume. The snapshot is not simply rolled back (which would be much quicker.) This approach makes sense in the situation where new stuff has been added to the datastore which we don’t want to lose, and just the old contents need to come back in. In this highly nested lab, it took 30 minutes to do two VMs of 4 GB size.

Image: NetApp Restore from Backup Start and Finish (~24 minutes)

Image: LONNFSVOL3 datastore with contents restored

Note: With the VSC, it is also possible to simply mount a backup snapshot, and VMs could be run from here then Storage vMotioned back into the original datastore.

Image: VSC 4.1 > Right-click Backup options = Edit (rename backup), Mount, Unmount, Delete

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