#Restoring replicated snapshot without SCV

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short bloom
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Looking for some guidance on the process of creating a manual FlexClone copy of a volume snapshot. Last week we had to restore a VMWare VM that got bricked from a Windows update. Since we don’t have SCV what I had to do was go into the GUI and select one of the local snapshots for the volume that this VM resides on, and make a FlexClone copy of that snapshot. I then mounted that volume to our vCenter, blew away our bricked VM and removed the folder on the production datastore, moved the folder from the FlexClone’d datastore onto production datastore, and then registered the .vmx file to the production datastore. After I verified that the VM was working I un-mounted the FlexClone’d datastore and deleted the corresponding volume on the NetApp.

So this process did work, but I’m curious on how I could do this for snapshots that have been replicated via SnapMirror to a destination cluster. I realize that the real best answer to my question is more than likely just “implement SnapCenter pluggin for VMWare” but my question specifically is if it is possible to basically manually “move” the snapshot from our destination cluster back to the original cluster, without reverting that whole volume to that snapshot point in time, and just make a cloned volume from which I can do the above steps.

half plinth
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A few ways to deal with this.

If you want the all storage way, flexclone the destination snapshot, snapmirror the clone volume to the source cluster. To make the sync faster, delete everything except what you want to recover and don’t mirror snapshots before initializing the mirror.

If the destination cluster has VMware, you could flexclone that snapshot, mount it on the destination VM cluster, and vmotion it back.

thorn ice
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At some of our customers we have added a datapath for (iSCSI/NFS) to the destination cluster, so that we can mount the clones directly... startup the VM, and do a storage vmotion while it is running... this will ofcause not work for everything it all depends on the VM load and datapath etc... but you get the VM up the fastest way possible... SCV does not do it this way.. it maps the clone, copies the VM and then starts it up... strange that they do not add a feature to register the VM on the destination and then move it... would be nice..