In the world of backup and recovery today, there are many methods of copying data and ways to store that data. Whether you are sending data to Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Object Storage, NFS, or Tape, there should be a policy-driven and simple way to accomplish it. Most IT pundits talk about how important it is to backup or archive data; very seldom do they talk about ways of recovering data regardless of location.

Rubrik provides a variety of methods to recover virtual or physical machines and restore protected data. Archiving snapshots is a method used to provide cost-effective long-term storage of snapshot data outside of the local Rubrik cluster transparently to the user. There is no need to schedule jobs or tasks to archive data and, regardless of location, all data is accessible from the same search interfaces. Rubrik deduplicates and compresses data before archiving, and encryption is used to encrypt all archive data.

Even when archived, a Rubrik cluster can transparently recover a source virtual machine (VM) and mount a point-in-time copy of the source VM. A VM can be recovered by using any of the standard Rubrik data protection methods. Backups are stored on a local Rubrik appliance, a remote Rubrik appliance, or a long-term archive. In this blog post, we will provide the steps to recover a VM by using the archival snapshot recovery action.

Download and Export from Cloudian Object Storage

Rubrik provides an efficient way to recover snapshots from a Cloudian Object Storage archival location. The download transfers a copy of the selected snapshot to the local Rubrik cluster so that it is available for additional local actions such as an export. The local Rubrik cluster provides a notification when the download is completed.

For instance, the snapshot may be used to create and mount a new VM on a Nutanix AHV host; this copy of the local VM is referred to as an export. The VM is uniquely named within the Nutanix Prism management tool. The name of the recovered VM is constructed as follows: name of source VM + timestamp of snapshot + incremented integer. The new VM is powered on but is disconnected from the network to avoid IP conflicts.

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Recovery from Cloudian Object Storage

Let’s walk through the simple recovery steps. The steps below can be mapped to any customer scenario in which a VM was deleted or corrupted and needs to be fully recovered from archive.

The first step is to retrieve the VM from archive.

In the Rubrik UI, on the left-side menu, select Virtual Machines > AHV VMs. The AHV VMs page appears, with the VMs tab selected, and displays all the VMs present in the system. Select the name of the “test” VM, and the localhost page for the selected VM appears.

The snapshots card is used to navigate to the archived snapshot of the “test” AHV VM. Notice that there are multiple recovery points across different days to select.

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Click the ellipsis (…) menu for the snapshot. From this menu, select Download. The Rubrik cluster retrieves the archival snapshot from the Cloudian archival repository. Status of the retrieval appears on the recent notifications list and on the Notifications page.

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The Activity Log provides a successful status that Rubrik has finished downloading snapshot of the “test” AHV VM. Now the snapshots card for the “test” AHV VM provides an icon that the snapshot has been successfully downloaded from the Cloudian archival repository.

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The second step is to export and power on the VM.

Select the recently downloaded archival snapshot and open the ellipsis menu for the snapshot. Next, choose Export, and the Export Snapshot dialog box appears. A list of the storage containers that are associated with the selected Nutanix Cluster appears. Choose a Nutanix Cluster for the “test” AHV VM. A list of the datastores that are associated with the select Nutanix host appears also. Provide a descriptive name for the soon to be exported VM as “Recovered_From_Cloudian” and choose to power it on. Click Export, and the magic begins.

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The Activity Log provides a successful status that Rubrik has finished exporting the archival snapshot of the “test” AHV VM.

The newly recovered VM “Recovered_From_Cloudian” is now powered up and running again on the Lenovo Converged HX3710 Nutanix Appliance within minutes.

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Conclusion

Rubrik provides customers with a very simple and powerful two-step approach to recover an AHV virtual machine from an archived snapshot running on a Lenovo Converged HX3710 Nutanix appliance and Lenovo Storage DX8200C (powered by Cloudian) appliance.

Want to learn more? Read the Solutions Walkthrough paper.