Compass Demo: Instant Restore for VMware Virtual Machines

One of the most stressful events for a VMware administrator is when a production application in a virtual machine has been lost or corrupted and must be recovered and operational as quickly as possible. These situations are exacerbated if it is a large application. In this demo we will show you how near-instant VM restore from Cobalt Iron Compass can speed recovery even for very large virtual machines.

One of the preferred ways to restore a full VMware virtual machine with Compass is through the vSphere client familiar to most VMware users. This is done using the Compass Spectrum Protect plug-in for vCenter.

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How does Compass backup and restore virtual machines?

In the vSphere client, we navigate to an individual virtual machine to be restored and select the ACTIONS menu to access the Compass plug-in.

Compass performs incremental forever backups for virtual machines and each backup is a full VM restore point. You can see we have several restore points available for this VM.

You can select the date and backup to recover from. 

You can choose to replace the existing VM or create a new one. Creating a new one is a good option if you want to keep the failed VM around to investigate or analyze.

There are several restore options available including a full instant VM restore.

How to perform a full instant restore of a VMware virtual machine with Compass

Compass creates and configures the VM and vmdk’s and initiates the restore into the VMware data store. However, at the same time, Compass allows the virtual machine to be brought up immediately in full read/write production mode, even while data block recovery for the VM is ongoing in the background.

• Select a vsphere host to use and click on NEXT.
• On the Select Resources tab choose selected disks to restore, or all of them.
• Choose which datastore to recover the VM on with the Select Storage tab.
• Select which proxy system accesses the mounted virtual disks from Compass for this restore operation with the Select Mount Proxy tab. This option becomes very valuable when restoring multiple VMs.
• Before starting the restore, the Ready to Complete tab summarizes all of the selected options. Click Finish to initiate the VM restore.

It will take a few seconds for the VM to be created, but once it appears we can power it up and the application will be in full production mode even if the actual data recovery continues for some time in the background.

Compass instant restore allows a VMware administrator to have an application VM fully recovered and available in a few seconds, even for a large, multi-TB virtual machine.

Explore other Compass Commander demos in our Cobalt Iron video series.