In this demo I have MCP for Fusion, Everpure Fusion fleets, MCP for vCenter, and MCP for Veeam software as the data protection layer. And I'm gonna walk through a simple scenario on how you can tie these three things together to simulate a recovery action. So let's say [I] work on the help desk or somewhere like that, or in the data protection space, and I get a call, and it's from the app team, and they say that this VM, so called test-vm01, data got corrupted.
So you'll notice I just asked where the VM is. I didn't say, "Hey, look on this array. Check in Veeam." I just say, "I got a VM." And it's going to go out there, locate where that VM lives, correlate that with the data protection space, and then tell me my options, just as I asked.
So it hasn't done anything yet. It's asking me things to check, right? Hey, do you need files? Do you need a database, right? What type of recovery do you need? Is it the whole VM you're gonna roll back, right? Is the VM still on?
I am confronted with, hey, these are the options you have, right? I have the backup. You have the snapshot. And you can use [the] Veeam Everpure plugin. I could do the FlashArray snapshot and copy to a new data store, right? And [it] gives me a profile of what I'm gonna lose from a data protection space.
And funny, this is probably not normally the case, but my backup is actually the more recent.
But now let's say, "You'd rather restore from the Veeam backup. Use Instant VM Recovery. Preferred method, full VM, and append restore, as I don't want to erase the original." Just giving it my intent.
What I really like about it is it sees my intent and understands how I meant to type it. And at any case, it's gonna print back what I'm looking for, so I can really be sure that it's doing what I asked. So we see here the restore point. It's gonna create a new VM.
It actually can't put restore in append. This is something I would've usually done manually. But it will put that timestamp there, so the same intent is there. It's not gonna erase the old VM. I'm gonna get a new VM, and that's exactly what I'm looking for.
And you'll notice it says at the back here, "The approval code expires in 15 minutes." So it puts this out there, but it doesn't leave it there forever. If you end up not doing it, get to something else, that will expire. You'd have to run through all this again so something unintentional doesn't happen later, right? So nice little safeguard built in.
Checking Results in vSphere
Let's go over here to vSphere and give it a check, and we'll see we have our other VM right here. So test-vm, et cetera, right timestamp. It's all powered off. It was intentionally left powered off. It's intentionally left not connected to the network, so I can make those changes here. If I wanted to force that, I could have asked it to, but we did it in the safest restore mode possible.
I'll just go ahead and say clean up, so it'll put all that away. If you wanted to migrate this fully, you would finish the migration process, which Veeam then vMotions it into the data store. Something you could finish if you really meant to recover this VM.
On the right you can see that test-vm01 restore in Instant Recovery has broken down, so Veeam has cleaned that up.
Application Lost
So you could reach out and say, "I know we have another VM, it's a SQL server, is it protected? What is the protection level of that?"
test-vm02 has one layer of protection, and its data store is nearly full. I know there's only one copy. There's a Veeam backup. Hey, if that repository is lost, you don't have a copy somewhere else, you're gonna have no way to fail back here.
Something I didn't even ask, but it knows that this is something that can cause an error, is that the DS03, the 93% full, meaning the data store itself might fill up, and that could actually cause an outage. Maybe clean up space on the disk. Maybe you wanna get this into a protection group. Maybe you wanna move this to another data store, right? Just giving me some options, even a little bit more than I asked.
Protection Recommendations
This is exactly where you could say, "What protection groups are available? Tell me about these protection groups. What are their schedules?" And then reach out and ask Everpure storage or their FlashArray to add that VM to those protection groups.
Of course, that protection group will make snapshots, which get picked up by the Veeam plugin, et cetera, and you get that double layer of protection. And honestly, you could do this across all your VMs, to see what is protected and what isn't protected and give you a balance of the two.
Wrap-up
I can be very specific from the VM's perspective. I can find out where the protection is on the Veeam side, where it is on the Pure side. I can get my available recovery options if I'm in a recovery scenario, and I can even compare them: how fast, the recovery point objective, the recovery time objective. Hopefully it gives you a glimpse of the possibilities with Everpure MCP.
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▶️ Video: https://youtu.be/3oMCYmpi3hc
📝 Write-up: https://thebetasociety.com/wcith/pure-storage/everpure-fusion-veeam-vcenter-mcp-vm-recovery-demo