VVols - restoring from SAN snapshots?

[NerdyBarry]

With the news surrounding VVols 2.0 and support for array based replication, we're evaluating VVols again. We run a lot of 3PAR storage arrays and currently leverage SAN snapshots and the Veeam SAN Snapshot Explorer for point in time recovery often.

Does anyone know if there would be any way to perform a similar file-based restore from a VVol backed VM snapshot? Since they're not normal volume objects in the 3PAR ecosystem I'm not sure whether there is any functionality that would enable the ability to browse the contents of the VVol snapshot. I don't even think you can export/present the VVol objects to hosts, can you?

It would be awesome to be able to browse the VVol snapshots through Veeam B&R the way we do now with standard SAN snapshots/VMFS volumes. We can dream, right??

[foggy]

Hi Steve, at the moment Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots doesn't support direct access to storage snapshots taken from a VVOL. Here's another thread with some considerations that might be useful.

[esiebert7625]

You might look at Recovery Manager Central, it supports VVols and I'm pretty sure you can do file based restores from VVol snapshots with it.

[NerdyBarry]

That would be awesome if you do file level restore from 3PAR Recovery Manager Central. I did a quick glance at the documentation and I only see reference to VM restores from vvols. And if I'm reading it right, it looks like it would overwrite the existing VM which doesn't help too much for restoring files from a snapshot.

Have you used recovery manager for restoration purposes? I can spin it up in a lab but if you've tried it already I'd be interested in hearing your experience.

Hi Steve, at the moment Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots doesn't support direct access to storage snapshots taken from a VVOL. Here's another thread with some considerations that might be useful.

Thanks for that foggy, there was some interesting information in that post. The ability to integrate with array replication was a huge step forward for vvols which is why I'm even thinking about it again. If we had the ability to somehow browse the contents of a vvol VM snasphot, we would almost be at feature parity with VMFS.