Tackling the Datto Restore to VMware in 5 Steps

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Tracy Rock

Director of Marketing @ Invenio IT

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Learn how to perform a Datto restore to VMware in a few minutes.

Datto is one of the premier data protection and disaster recovery providers on the market. Their flagship product, the SIRIS, has a reputation for providing exceptional service to their end-users of large and small to mid-sized businesses around the world. There have been multiple iterations of the SIRIS line, each one making notable strides over the previous model to provide an unprecedented level of total data protection. Aside from being able to recover downed servers and lost data in seconds, the new SIRIS 3 comes with ransomware protection—an industry first.

However, one of its biggest advantages over other business continuity solutions its ability to work across multiple platforms, like: Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. What’s more, it is a great complement to other backup software such as VMWare.  With VMware, the Datto SIRIS can perform a full data restore to numerous virtual machines instantaneously. It really is amazing how they seamlessly work together. And, while it may sound complicated, it really isn’t.

So, how exactly do you do a Datto restore to VMware? It’s a good question that we’ve been receiving a lot lately. That said, here are a few steps that will help you to export a backup as a VMDK and return it to its permanent storage location within the VMware vSphere environment. VMDK is a popular storage method because of its safety and reliability when it comes to data restoration.

Step 1. Make sure you include the NFS share from the Datto device to VMware as a datastore. Then, launch the VMware vSphere Client to connect with vCenter server or ESXi Host. Now, you should be able to log in. Click “storage” and select the name of the host you would like to restore to the virtual machine. Next, click on the tab “Datastore”. From here, right-click the hostname and select “Storage”, followed by “New Datastore”. Now, you can follow the series of prompts to create the datastore.

Step 2. Select or create a new datastore to house the new VM. There are two ways this can go, depending on whether or not you have access to the VMware command line. If you have accesss, you can copy the datastore from the temporary Datto recovery to a permanent datastore on VMware with thin disk provisioning:

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/YourDataStoreName/C.vmdk -d thin /vmfs/volumes/DestinationDataStoreName/C.vmdk

Or, you can also copy the datastore from the temporary Datto recovery to a permanent datastore with thick disk provisioning:

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/YourDataStoreName/C.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/DestinationDataStoreName/C.vmdk

That said, these are the steps to copy a VMDK with thick provisioning if there are limitations with the VMWare GUI.

First, right-click on the newly created datastore, and select “browse files”. This will be the “source datastore” as you move forward. Next, repeat the last step on the datastore you will use for the permanent location of the restored VM. You will use this datastore as the “destination datastore” in the following steps. Here, you can create and name your folder.

Step 3. Copy the VMDK from the Datto NFS share to its permanent home on VMware.  Stay with me, we are almost there. From here, select the VMDK, and “copy” to paste the file into the destination datastore.

Step 4. Create and start a new VM from the VMDK. Right-click on the host, and choose “new virtual machine”. The wizard will guide you through configuring the virtual machine. Once you see the “customize hardware”, select “existing hard disk”, then “add”. Now, you should be able to choose the datastore where the VMDK is located. Choose the VMDK of the boot volume and click through the prompts to finish.

 Step 5. Go ahead and boot the virtual server! Congratulations. your mission is complete.

We hope this helps explain (and simplify) the steps necessary to perform a Datto restore to VMware. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

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