Today there was a cool article released on the Storage Nuts & Bolts blog. It’s about file level recovery from within a VMDK based on an NFS datastore. NFS is just mentioned cause this is the preferred way to go for the NetApp family, but it doesn’t matter NFS or VMFS the solution they came up with works for the both of them.
This option was recently discovered and further developed (Registry entries and Batch script) by one of the NetApp SE’s (Mike Arndt) and it’s very effective and free for those customers that already have a CIFS license with their NetApp arrays, which is a very large percentage. The other important factor is that Mike has made it a point-and-click process. Great job Mike!!!
As part of their VMware Disk Developer’s Kit, VMware provides a vmware-mount.exe utility that allows for mounting an existing VMDK on a Windows Driver letter. We’ll be using this utility as well to mount the VMDK as well as some Registry Entries and a Batch Script to further simplify the file recovery process.
I don’t to republish the complete article, so visit the blog and use the script and registry settings these guys created. Especially the first option with registry settings, which give you the possibility to mount a VMDK with just a “right click – mount” action is great!