A Comprehensive Step-by-Step VM Cloning Guide

BusinessReport385 Moffett Park Dr. Sunnyvale, CA 94089 844-478-8349 www.Datrium.com

2

Introduction The DVX is designed from ground up to be VM-aware with efficient VM clone and snap capability that enables quick creation, deployment and seamless use of cloned VMs with zero performance impact. Here are the ways in which the user can leverage Datrium-native cloning technology. Here are the specific ways to clone a VM on the DVX – both live VMs or from older VM snapshots.

Datrium Live VM Clone – DVX software offers a native VM clone operation that is much more efficient than VMWare clone methods. This can be found on the Datrium DVX plugin in your vSphere client.

1 ] Browse to the VM tab, check the VM to be cloned and select it to see the various operations available on it.

2 ] To clone a VM, a consistent snapshot of the files of the Virtual Machine is taken and the clone is created from this snapshot, which ensures that the read and write operations on the active VM in the Datastore are not affected by the clone operation.

DVX also exposes the ability to take 'VSS' (Volume Shadow-Copy Service) enabled clones. Application-consistent snapshots are used to ensure on-disk consistency and can help reduce recovery time for database appli-cations. Due to the native integration with the Datrium platform, VM stun times are eliminated, drastically reducing any application performance dips. As a result, admins can take VM-level pauseless snapshots of applica-tions with high change rates and at greater frequencies for more granular recovery points.

3

Datrium VM clone from snapshot

This is used for provisioning a VM from a previously created backup snapshot of another VM. The first step is to identify the snapshot that you want cloned. This can be done starting with the Protection tab on the Datrium UI, picking the relevant Protection Group that contains your Virtual Machine and the snapshot of interest. This takes you to the snapshot details page. Pick the Virtual Machine to be cloned from this snapshot and from the drop-down menu select the Clone option as highlighted below.

Step by Step Guide

4

Cloning Multiple VMs via Protection Groups

In order to protect a business application, it is necessary to capture the state of multiple VMs (and / or files, virtual disks) constituting that application. For example, one Virtual Machine could be running a database and another Virtual Machine could be hosting a Web Server serving this data. Since both these Virtual Machines are related, DVX gives user the ability to logically group them into a 'Protection Group' (PG). Multiple VMs and/or files can be added to a Protection Group with desired snapshots and replication policy. Attributes such as snapshot frequency, retention period, replication target etc. can be defined at the Protection Group level. All Virtual Machines in the Protection Group are snapped in a consistent fashion and then this snapshot can be cloned with a single operation. Cloning the snapshot highlighted in the picture will result in cloning all the VMs included in it. This is done as an atomic operation, so, if the task runs into an error halfway through the clone process, you will see no change to your Datastore. The cloned Virtual Machines are placed in the user-provided Folder and are named with the user provided Prefix as shown below.

5

Datrium VAAI Plugin for VDI Clone

VAAI is an acronym for vSphere Storage APIs Array Integration. VAAI provides hardware offload APIs that allow VMware ESXi hosts to offload storage operations such as storage cloning onto storage arrays that support VAAI to speed up VMware I/O operations. Datrium DVX supports VAAI for zero-copy clone operations. If your workload includes any type of linked clones, including VDI, there are substantial benefits from installing the Datrium VAAI VIB file. VAAI exposes different primitives for block storage arrays (Fibre channel, iSCSI, Fibre channel over ethernet protocols) and NAS storage arrays (NFS protocols). In the case of VDI, View Composer Array Integration (VCAI) leverages VAAI-NAS fast cloning primitive to rapidly create virtual desktop clones. Here is a screenshot of Horizon View which enables VAAI for rapid native cloning.

At times, virtualization admins need to restore a Virtual Machine or a set of Virtual Machines to their state in the past, perhaps because a user wants to undo the most recent changes to a VM or a planned cleanup of a Test/Dev environment after testing or if the files are encrypted by ransomware, thus making them inaccessible. This can easily be done by navigating to the snapshot of interest and selecting the restore operation as shown below, and can be done at the VM level or PG level as well to restore all Virtual Machines of the PG snapshot. There are couple of ways that this operation can be accomplished.

For VM level restore, select the VM to be restored in the Datrium GUI and click on restore, similar to the live VM clone shown above. This will take you to a list of snapshots existing for that VM. Select the desired snapshot and click on restore.

Virtual Machine Restore

6

To restore a PG, you will need to select the PG from the Protection tab and click on restore as shown below. This will also show all the snapshots available for that PG and you can easily select the one to be restored from.

The following is the sequence of steps taken by the DVX software to restore a VM snapshot or an entire PG snapshot:

1 ] Checks if it is safe to restore the Virtual Machines and Files in the snapshot – In this stage a series of extensive checks on the Datastore are done to ensure that running VMs are not going to affected by the restore operation.

2 ] Takes a backup snapshot of current state of the VM being restored – This helps with protecting any files/folders created since the recovery point. Thus the user can easily undo the restore and go back to current state of VM if the restored copy is not needed anymore or was done by accident.

7

3 ] Restores the VM back to the selected snapshot state.

The DVX is built with simplicity and manageability at its heart. We believe in making our customers' tasks easy and our features such as clone, snapshots and restore are built with the same idea.

Datrium is the leader in Open Converged Infrastructure for hybrid clouds, converging Tier 1 HCI, scale-out backup and cloud disaster recovery for vastly simpler administration, protection of hybrid cloud infrastructure, and higher IO performance than available with traditional alternatives. The company is led by the CTOs and founders from Data Domain and early principal engineers from VMware.

About Datrium