Use Nexsan Unity for high performance CR with Arcserve UDP and Instant Virtual Machine – Part 3

Hello everyone.

Welcome to the final third part, as it were, for this series of how to videos. This one with myself, Richard Hornsby and Kevin green is going to be using basically Nexsan Unity for for high performance Dr with arcs of UDP and instant virtual machine.

I think we're going to do a couple of kind of recovery like file type recovery stuff, aren't we, Kevin, and then move on to instant virtual machine, or maybe the other way around. But what we'll do is we'll, I'll stop talking and hand over to you, and we'll get going right? So if I stop sharing rights, over to you.

Okay, hello again, everybody. You should be able to see my screen. To make it a little bit easier for this session, I've split it, so I've got VMware on my left hand side and I've got arcserve UDP on my right.

So just to recap on the recovery VM there's my immutable snapshot that I've mounted as a data store in arcserve UDP. Remember it's red because it's restore only because it's on a mutable mount point.

So I'm going to go back into here now. First of all, I'm going to take you through an instant virtual machine, which some manufacturers or software companies call it instant on oxy have called it instant virtual machine. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click on this node or server. I'm going to say, create instant VM.

I can choose from different points if I have them, which is really handy, especially when it comes to DR Remember, these are all being booted without doing a restore from the immutable mount point, from the Unity. So I choose next. Need the password. Obviously, security is important.

I then tell it the hypervisor, and obviously I've got two choices, but I'm going to point it at my ESX environment. Going to hit configure. All straightforward. There's nothing complicated here. I just wait for the hypervisor to appear, click that box.

Click Configure.

Wait for a few seconds. Once it's finished, I can click next,

or maybe a few more seconds. Okay, down the bottom, click Next.

This is just a recap on what we're doing, so I'll click Next again.

This is the important bit, an instant VM, even though it's coming from an immutable read only location can be used to place it onto the network for live access. You ask yourself, How am I going to do that from this immutable read only location? It has a write cache. So if I point this at a folder called instant VM, for instance, when this boots, if I wanted to put it live on the network, people can take data out of the immutable and read only part, and any changes get put in the cache, and then you could save that virtual machine or instant VM as a running machine by migrating it within your hypervisor itself.

So next step here is, I had a network card. I'm pretty on my test network because my other one's live. I'm going to choose my standard stuff. I could even change the IP, etc, etc, CPU, memory can be changed. And I just do next.

If I had multiple virtual machines or even physical because remember, if this was a physical machine, backup, it would boot it as a virtual machine, and do the P to V. So I could have different ones with different start times. I'm just going to choose Finish. I'm going to choose boot. Now.

What that will do is, and if you say, seconds, you'll see on the left, it will create a virtual machine in my ESX environment. There you go, UDP, instant, VM, Nexsan virtual machine, and it will start doing everything it needs to do.

That's great. So what we're showing here really is that even though the data store that we're recovering from here is on Nexsan Unity. It's actually reading it from an immutable snapshot, isn't it, so that you know that's going to be intact. So any kind of event that's happened on maybe primary storage, be it ransomware or even something worse, you know, like fire, explosion, flood, whatever it may be, you can still recover it directly, kind of using that next and unity mutable snapshot, which is great.

Correct, and by combining it with something like, in this case, arcserve, when that virtual machine is booted, you could actually attach an ISO image with your ransomware cyber security tools on there. You could validate if that was valid or it was recoverable. From a point of view, is it infected? If it is infected, you shut it down and you go back to one of the other points. The point here is The Unity makes it immutable and makes sure no data can be changed or actually affected or encrypted. The Arc service using that to actually do its side of the actual piece of the puzzle by booting it.

So in a few seconds, or another 45 seconds that'll boot while that's being created and the initial data is being hydrated and pushed into VMware, I'm going to go back to all nodes. I'm going to do right click on the same node and go restore this time.

This is the restore screen. I'm just going to show you this because this is something interesting.

That if I wanted to do a file, a folder restore, if I choose Browse recovery points, it says no points found. That's because the plan is pointed to the original data store. Don't forget, we've mounted a new one called Nexan. So I click OK.

That could be an example. I guess, if that data store isn't available as well, correct? Yeah, if it's Yeah, did a copy or something like that, then, you know, this is great.

Yeah, it could be corrupted. Absolutely perfect. So I'm going to hit change, and all I have to do here Nexsan, and automatically, it sees all the servers that are in that immutable data store at that point in time. I could choose any of them. I could choose recovery VM, do, okay, there's my backups.

And all still from the immutable snapshot.

All from the immutable cannot be altered, but I can restore from them. So in this case, I put in my password again
and a go. This must be a backup of it's the backup of the arc server recovery VM. So there's my databases.

I could click on a database.

I could restore, dump, etc, etc, or I could come all the way back up here. And the speed of this is what's important. If you were trying to do this on most object stores, clicking on OK, and waiting for this to mount would be minutes to quite a while. It could take a long time. It's surprising. You can see all I'm doing is clicking on it and it's expanding the actual information.

I can go into any of these try and find something that's usable. Well, you can see how quick it's opening it, and I can just choose so it's done. Restoring is that simple? I can either restore it to original location. If I choose that one, I can choose next box, standard recovery, nothing special, really straightforward. Or for one to two, I could download it as a zip file. And this is all coming from, as Richard pointed out, the immutable storage.

So if I cancel incredibly fast, I've seen, you know, it's a bit of an egg timer moment, normally, isn't it? You know what I mean, just one. Mean? Just waiting for these things, even when you're expanding through the the directory tree, can be slow and painful. So now that's really, it's really, really performant, which is great.

And that is that, if you take one thing away from these three video sessions, is RTO.

RTO is the most important thing about immutable restore. The last thing you need is somebody saying to you, I need a server back in an hour. But because your immutable platform is not high performance, is some sort of complex, complex object store that has to reconstruct all the objects, and then they need to be hydrated again. Then that can take a considerable amount of time. You need the data back as fast as possible. Once your backups are done, your backups are done, as long as they're intact and valid, they're safe. Once they're on the Nexsan a copy of them, they're immutable. They cannot be altered. But the point here is, when you want to come back to recovering that data, I need it that fast. I don't want to be going away and waiting an hour for an instant virtual machine to boot, or two hours to then have to do it to a different one and so on. So this is now ready, and it will be sending a command through to VMware very shortly, if not in seconds.

Yeah. I mean, I always used to look at the VM status, and you normally get like, a row of green, don't you? Maybe some yellow, but that's looking,

Yeah, you can preempt it. I can do that, but it's just waited to send the command through. Give it another couple of seconds. There you go. Power on VM.

Yeah. So it's actually, it's actually creating it. It's having to actually build a VM. It's having to hydrate all the blocks that are required to make it bootable into the virtual machine. Now some people will say to me, how does it do that? Well, actually, that's quite straightforward. If we enhance that to full screen size, and we look at storage, we have an NFS connection appear. So arc serve and VMware work in tangent through an NFS link from the immutable storage from the data store.

So that's how it presents it.

But if we go back to here, let's power that on. Just need to wait for it to finally come up, and then we can do a refresh, taking a couple more seconds?

Yeah, I don't mind this taking it's one of those things where any other platform, I feel like we'd be we'd have to pause it and, you know, wait 20 minutes, going to make a cup of tea or something. But with this, it's there. Look, look at that. That's fantastic.

Yeah, and this is the thing that's, this is the most important thing. Remember, if this was, well, yeah, it's already booted. It's there. It's done. It's ready now that's basically it means you can test any server in your environment from your immutable backup storage on the Unity via your arc save interface, without having to do a restore, without having to determine at what point was it, was it actually hit by the virus?

And you can do it all in a test environment, in a sand pit, all in content, in basically because of performance of the Unity. It's as simple as that.

Fantastic, right? Well, I think, I think that's a good conclusion for the three parts. I think Kevin, so thank you very much for your time. Very much appreciated. And hopefully, you know anyone out there that is using ArcServ UDP and looking at kind of alternative, immutable options, will see that the the Unity, is a good choice. So thank you very much, and thank you all for watching.

I hope you enjoyed that, and hopefully we'll see you soon.

Thank you.
Bye.