Need to recover data from vVols! | NetApp | Page 1

gleaming iris Jul 4, 2025, 3:53 PM

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Need to recover data from vVols!
Hey Guys,

I have a huge problem and need some advice. I've been going for about 24h straight trying to fix this. (With only the advice of google gemini).

I have very recently installed a refurbished NetApp AFF-A300

I set up OTV 10.2 to my vmware cluster, with vVol over iSCSI.

I migrated all my vms over to do some maintenance on my other storage array (yes vcenter and OTV also, because I am an idiot).

And ofcourse I had a power outage longer than my UPS could handle yesterday.

I installed a new vcenter and OTV on one of the esxes but could not get it to mount the vVol.

I've tried a lot of stuff now. But no success.

What i have actually managed to do is reinstall one of my esxi hosts, set up a new vcenter and OTV on it and get it to create a vVol datastore with the same storage containers as were on the other old install.

But i still have no way to register the vm's because the vVol is not a regular file based datastore.

I really only need to save like 10 vm's out of the bunch that are dead.

So, does anyone have any idea how i could extract the data from the vvol luns in my Netapp?

I am desperate!

KR
Calle

teal glen Jul 4, 2025, 5:53 PM

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I feel your pain. We had to do this in the past and it took many many hours. Basically you create a new VM and attach the vVols (which are LUNs in ONTAP) to the VM (RDM) and try to boot it. When it boots you note what server it is and try to find the remaining VMDKs. It helps a lot if you know the sizes of your virtual harddisks as those will be the sizes of yout LUNs (e.g. if all Windows servers have 32gb bootdisks then it's pretty easy to find those and go from there. If you then know that your SQL disks were 240gb in size you can also quickly find those, etc.)

gleaming iris Jul 4, 2025, 6:05 PM

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The ones i need are pretty small, and time i have. I've been down that road a little bit but the problem was that the luns that are of the class vvol can't be mapped to a host. I dont know how to get around that.

teal glen Jul 4, 2025, 7:08 PM

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you might need to create a flexclone of the lun to have the system see it as "normal" LUN

gleaming iris Jul 4, 2025, 7:12 PM

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thanks, will look into that, i've got 30 years in the business but a n00b with netapps 😦

teal glen Jul 4, 2025, 7:15 PM

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either file clone create alone, or followed by lun create -file-path /vol/foo/clone.lun -class regular ... ... can't check right now

gleaming iris Jul 4, 2025, 7:17 PM

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thx again, i'll figure it out.

teal glen Jul 4, 2025, 7:23 PM

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basically a LUN is just a file. In the worst case you should be able to create a file share on the volume and copy/recover the LUN that way

gleaming iris Jul 4, 2025, 9:20 PM

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didn't manage to map a lun, i can't get rid of the vvol class. also can't copy/do anything with the luns over nfs. gotta take a break now been on it for 30 hours. And it's really only my own small env 😄

I'll take any tips, tricks or suggestions when i keep troubleshooting tomorrow.

gleaming iris Jul 5, 2025, 3:57 PM

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i have managed to access all the LUNs by mounting a nfs volume on the storage container volume. and i can copy them to another server but I cant figure out how to actually do anything with them to extract data

teal glen Jul 5, 2025, 5:38 PM

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depending on the file system, 7zip can open a lot of disk/partition images and extract files, so you might want to try that. Other than that, you would need to attach them as disk to an existing VM, or on Linux you can loopback-mount the image directly

gleaming iris Jul 5, 2025, 6:34 PM

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tried mounting both on vms and loopback

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didn't work

teal glen Jul 5, 2025, 8:11 PM

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if the disk image has partitions (which it usually does) you need to use losetup -Pf /path/to/disk.img and then you should be able to mount /dev/loop0p1, /dev/loop0p2 and so on, provided that Linux knows and understands the file systems involved (might need installation of a few packages)

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otherwise please post error messages and dmesg output that you're getting

gleaming iris Jul 6, 2025, 10:05 AM

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This is how it looks when i try:

root@file01:/data/recovery# losetup -Pf /data/recovery/naa.600a098038313749492459595846792d.vmdk
root@file01:/data/recovery# fdisk -l /dev/loop0
Disk /dev/loop0: 50 GiB, 53687091200 bytes, 104857600 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

This is the only message in dmesg
[237784.914400] loop0: detected capacity change from 0 to 104857600

testdisk does not find a partition table either.

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i spent last night trying to get the old vvols to present on a new instance of ontap tools by adding them to the right collection in mongodb, but no luck :/

gleaming iris Jul 6, 2025, 6:09 PM

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i found this one now in the swagger api for OTV:

PUT /virtualization/api/v1/vcenters/{vcguid}/vvols/{uuid}

Create vVol with existing LUN/File UUID from ONTAP

I'm getting this error message atm the moment:
{"error":{"code":"not_found","message":"path is missing/invalidInvalid Path parameter","resolution":"Verify path parameters","target":"uuid"}}

Anyone know how to use this?

#Need to recover data from vVols!