Recovering a Deleted Virtual Machine with VVols

Virtual Volumes provide a great many benefits, some large, some small. Depending on the VM, recovering a deleted VM could be either of those.

With traditional VMFS, once you have selected “delete from disk” restoring that VM could have been a process. Either restoring from backup or hoping you had a snapshot of the VMFS on the array. Either way, you are probably going to incur data loss, as the last backup or snapshot is unlikely to be from the time right before the deletion.

Let me be VERY clear here. Regardless to the rest of this post, I am not saying once you move to VVols you do not need backup! You absolutely still do. VVols just give you a nice way to do an immediate recovery of the latest point-in-time without having to lose anything, assuming your array support it.

“Wait, did you say delete VM “AD” or VM “80”?”

“Um… definitely not AD that’s our active directory…”

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PowerShell GUI VMware and FlashArray Storage Management Tool

Here is my storage manager for the FlashArray and VMware. Based on PowerCLI, but uses a front end GUI. Enjoy!

NOTICE THIS HAS BEEN DEPRECATED IN FAVOR OF THE POWERSHELL MODULE HERE:
https://www.codyhosterman.com/scripts-and-tools/pure-storage-powershell-vmware-module/

There are a variety of methods of managing VMware objects (VMFS volumes, VMs, VMDKs and RDMs) and the underlying snapshots to recovery or clone them. But often I get asked if I have a PowerShell (PowerCLI) script to do one or all of them. I have a bunch on my GitHub, but I decided a week or so ago to put something a bit more robust together. At first I was making it a standard interactive script, but it morphed into a GUI, using combo-boxes etc:

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Commvault IntelliSnap technology with VMware and the FlashArray

This is a post that is somewhat a long time coming as I did the work for this jeez basically in August 2015, but never got around to actually writing a blog post. Shame on me. Anyways, here it is!

Let us start with the requirements:

  • FlashArray 400 series or FlashArray//m
  • Purity v4.1.1 (or higher)
  • REST API: v1.4 (found in Purity v4.x and higher)
  • Fibre Channel or iSCSI Protocol
  • Commvault software version 10 service pack 12 or later with Commvault IntelliSnap software license

Some documentation links:

Pure Storage Community Commvault Page

FlashArray VMware & Commvault White Paper

Commvault VMware Setup

YouTube Demo Playlist

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