Cohesity Recovery
In this blog I am going to focus on the Cohesity recovery tools, as in a previous blog, I looked at the Cohesity Secondary Storage, which predominately revolved around setting up the Cohesity storage and enabling VMware Virtual Machines (VM) protection.
Part of the Cohesity protection options is to allow indexing of the Virtual machines, to allow fast recovery of individual files. I assume that this indexing is using the same technology that Cohesity use for their Big Data search capabilities. To be honest, the ability to recover individual files from a VM in now a defacto standard in all backup software and if this had been missing, then this solution would have been pointless.
The actual procedure to recover an entire VM or a file from a VM is very straight forward and from the limited testing, I can conduct based on now many protection jobs I can complete in my testing period, its interface remains responsive.
Recovery process
To recover a VM or a File, can start from the main dashboard page, click on the Recover button starts the recovery wizard.
To recover a VM or a File, can start from the main dashboard page, click on the Recover button starts the recovery wizard.
Recovering Files or Folder is done by entering a file name or a path. I found this can be a little frustrating if you are trying to recover an entire folder. This many ultimately be because I am personally used to an interface that provides the classic file and folder view and allows for drilling down to a specific folder or file.
Once the item to recover is located and indicated, you then choose which recovery point to use.
Complete the final details, if recovering to the same VM, then enter the required credentials and whether to overwrite the existing files.
Summary
The Cohesity recovery process for a VM or filesFolders is very straight forward to use and the test that was performed all worked as expected.
The Cohesity storage system as a whole works very well in providing protection for VMware Virtual Machines. From adding the Cohesity Storage to the MirrorSphere test VM lab, it took only a few minutes before I had protection jobs running. It is significantly quicker than setting up another VM-only backup solution.
As the Cohesity storage is 3 or 4 servers (nodes) within a 2U chassis, it has an abundant number of CPU cycles to provide additional services. Another service that Cohesity provide is big data analytics, with this in mind, the same service provides the indexing capabilities to protected VMs. An advantage of this is that this has now offloaded a load from the primary VMware Cluster, reducing CPU and Storage IO requirements, some other VM-only backup software hosted on a VMware cluster increasing load while backups and indexing occur.
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