NetWorker 9.1 FLR Web Interface


Hey, don’t forget, my new book is available. Jam packed with information about protecting across all types of RPOs and RTOs, as well as helping out on the procedural and governance side of things. Check it out today on Amazon! (Kindle version available, too.)


In my introductory NetWorker 9.1 post, I covered file level recovery (FLR) from VMware image level backup via NMC. I felt at the time that it was worthwhile covering FLR from within NMC as the VMware recovery integration in NMC was new with 9.1. But at the same time, the FLR Web interface for NetWorker has also had a revamp, and I want to quickly run through that now.

First, the most important aspect of FLR from the new NetWorker Virtual Proxy (NVP, aka “vProxy”) is not something you do by browsing to the Proxy itself. In this updated NetWorker architecture, the proxies are very much dumb appliances, completely disposable, with all the management intelligence coming from the NetWorker server itself.

Thus, to start a web based FLR session, you actually point your browser to:

https://nsrServer:9090/flr

The FLR web service now runs on the NetWorker server itself. (In this sense quite similarly to the FLR service for Hyper-V.)

The next major change is you no longer have to use the FLR interface from a system currently getting image based backups. In fact, in the example I’m providing today, I’m doing it from a laptop that isn’t even a member of the NetWorker datazone.

When you get to the service, you’ll be prompted to login:

01 Initial Login

For my test, I wanted to access via the Administration interface, so I switched to ‘Admin’ and logged on as the NetWorker owner:

02 Logging In as Administrator

After you login, you’re prompted to choose the vCenter environment you want to restore from:

03 Select vCenter

Selecting the vCenter server of course lets you then choose the protected virtual machine in that environment to be recovered:

04 Select VM and Backup

(Science fiction fans will perhaps be able to intuit my host naming convention for production systems in my home lab based on the first three virtual machine names.)

Once you’ve selected the virtual machine you want to recover from, you then get to choose the backup you want to recover – you’ll get a list of backups and clones if you’re cloning. In the above example I’ve got no clones of the specific virtual machine that’s been protected. Clicking ‘Next’ after you’ve selected the virtual machine and the specific backup will result in you being prompted to provide access credentials for the virtual machine. This is so that the FLR agent can mount the backup:

05 Provide Credentials for VM

Once you provide the login credentials (and they don’t have to be local – they can be an AD specified login by using the domain\account syntax), the backup will be mounted, then you’ll be prompted to select where you want to recover to:

06 Select Recovery Location

In this case I selected the same host, recovering back to C:\tmp.

Next you obviously need to select the file(s) and folder(s) you want to recover. In this case I just selected a single file:

07 Select Content to Recover

Once you’ve selected the file(s) and folder(s) you want to recover, click the Restore button to start the recovery. You’ll be prompted to confirm:

08 Confirm Recovery

The restore monitor is accessible via the bottom of the FLR interface, basically an upward-pointing arrow-head to expand. This gives you a view of a running, or in this case, a complete restore, since it was only a single file and took very little time to complete:

09 Recovery Success

My advice generally is that if you want to recover thousands or tens of thousands of files, you’re better off using the NMC interface (particularly if the NetWorker server doesn’t have a lot of RAM allocated to it), but for smaller collections of files the FLR web interface is more than acceptable.

And Flash-free, of course.

There you have it, the NetWorker 9.1 VMware FLR interface.


Hey, don’t forget, my new book is available. Jam packed with information about protecting across all types of RPOs and RTOs, as well as helping out on the procedural and governance side of things. Check it out today on Amazon! (Kindle version available, too.)


 

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