LINUX individual file restores From VMware Method Backups (NBU7)

[MILB65]

All

TIA for taking time to read.

Environment:

NBU7 Solaris 10 master

Win2k3sp2 Proxy server

DD880 target

We are backing up over 1900 VM's, 40% Linux and 60% Windows.  We are able to perform individual file restores for any Windows servers.  However, when trying to restore a individual file restore from a NIX machine we are unable to do so.  We get the standard error of "Warning: unable to obtain list of files using specified search criteria".
 

We can select the VMDK file for restore, however we are unable to browse into the VMDK to perform an individual file restore.

[Ed_Wilts · Accepted solution]

Individual file restores on Linux systems are not yet supported. 

For now, you'll need to do a full VM restore to a dummy guest and mount the file systems up and copy the files off of them.

As you can imagine, single file restores are non-trivial when you start introducing logical volume managers (and multiples of them) and multiple file systems from ext3, xfs, etc.  This isn't Windows where you have no logical volume manager and only a single file system (NTFS).

For what it's worth, other vendors have the same restrictions - SnapManager for VMware from NetApp supports single-file restores from Windows VMDK files but not Linux.

[MILB65]

I thought so, just wanted to make sure that I was not going insane and missing something.

[Tim_Hansen]

Ed is right.  Unfortunately the limitation would have to be addressed by VMware before Netbackup can offer this functionality.