Restore of single files from Nimble Storage Snapshot not created by Veeam

[d.artzen]

Hello together,

I have the following situation: An internal website that was rarely used was lost due to upgrade operations (it was hosted on a webserver with a different purpose and had been forgotten when the webserver was renewed on a new VM). The old VM was deleted after some time and sadly this issue was first noticed after the backups of that VM were deleted through retention policy. So a restore from our backup is not possible, since it does not exist anymore.
But I found that the datastore this VM resided on (HPE Nimble) has an old storage snapshot, where this VM still existed. This was not created by Veeam, since we did not configure Storage Integration in Veeam.
So my question is: Is there any way that this storage snapshot can be used by Veeam to do either a file level restore or a at least a VM restore? I can't restore the whole datastore since there are much more VMs using that datastore.

Edit: The Nimble is attached to a Vmware 7 Infrastructure via FiberChannel-Cards in the ESXi Hosts. Vcenter is also used.

Thanks in advance.
Best regards
Daniel

[DChiavari]

Hello Daniel, yes, it is possible to perform restores (entire VM, disk/volume, file-level, application-level) from any storage snapshots, not only the ones created by Veeam. Once you add the storage systems to the B&R console and a rescan is performed, you should be able to see all existing snapshots of VMware datastores and you can restore from those.

[Andreas Neufert]

Yes, if it is a VMDK based VM, we can restore the VM or VM guest files.
Use a Proxy that has access to the Nimble SAN area. Follow configuration best practices (for example you need to configure Nimble Host settings for your ESXi hosts in the right way that they do not see the snapshots).
Then add the Nimble to Veeam. Veeam will automatically rescan all snapshots and detect the VMs within those snapshots. Potentially to fasten up the process, you can limit the Veeam processing to a single volume.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

Then you can restart the wizards.

Other option if for whatever reason the Veeam way is not possible.
You can clone the snapshot (make it read writable) and mount it to a ESXi host (resignurate the volume if you mount it to a host with the same datastore present). Then you can register the VM from there (right click on the vmx file within ESXi file browser). Disable network access and boot the VM or mount the disks to other temporary VMs to copy things around.

[d.artzen]

Thank you both for your fast reply. I have tried the way via Veeam, but since I don't have a viable Proxy with access to the FC infrastructure I can't get correct access to the snapshot. Veeam shows me the current VMs on the datastore, not the ones that should be inside the snapshot.
I was able to use the way Andreas described and cloned the snapshot and importing it to VMware. I now have access to the deleted machine.

Thanks again.
Best regards
Daniel

[Andreas Neufert]

You do not need FC for the proxy to scan, for FC volumes we can use iSCSI as well. We show first the actual VMs and after the Snapshot was scanned we will correct the view to the real ones living in the snapshot (but this is possible only after us mounting the volume to the proxy to scan for what is in there).

If you have the Enteprise Plus license or Veeam Universal License I recommend to look into the storage integration and implement it anyway. It is better RPO/RTO and you can leverage the snapshots for it.

Glad that it worked out in the end for you with the manual way. Let us know if we can help more.