You can configure and run your restore plans from Data Manager’s main menu, under Restore > Restore Plan<\/strong>, shown below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this case, I don’t yet have any restore plans, so I’ll click Add to start creating one. The restore plan itself is quite minimal, but the restore groups<\/em> have a number of options to them so there’s a bit to step through. As you’ll see in the step through though, those options are what gives you so much power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Start by giving the plan a name and an optional description, then choose whether you’re going to add assets or select a resource group. Note that a resource group isn’t the same as a restore group: a resource group (controlled under Administration > Access Control > Resource Group) allows you to assign specific resources to users and roles on the system. (Which means you can quickly fold those resource groups into your restore plans and keep the two in sync, if you’re using them.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this case, I’m going to select All Assets<\/strong> as my scope, because I want to browse all assets on the system to determine which ones I want in my restore plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since this is a net new config so the first thing I need to do is click Add Group<\/strong>. That’ll bring up the start of the new restore group function:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since you can have a lot of assets in a restore group, make sure to give it a meaningful name, then choose how you’re going to select assets for membership. Restore plans currently support Virtual Machines, and you can choose whether you want to add assets based on a rule definition, manually or that belong to specific policies. In this case, I’m going to chose to add the assets manually:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once I’ve selected the virtual machines, I can click Next<\/strong> to continue. This is where the fun starts!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now I get to choose which copy I want to restore \u2013 not only in terms of time, but also from which Data Domain system, too! In the example above, I’ve chosen to use the most recent copy for each selected asset. Here are the custom timeframe options:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first option, shown above, is to specify a particular date range you want to use to recover from. (Great option for randomly proving recoverability through an audited legal discovery period!) You’ll see there’s an option (selected by default) to just recover the most recent copy if there’s no copy found in the specified date range.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other option, shown below, lets you choose to recover a copy from a particular number of days prior<\/em> to whenever you run the restore plan:<\/p>\n\n\n\n These three time range options give you a huge<\/em> amount of flexibility in picking which copy you want to recover from. Having done that, it’s then a case of picking where<\/em> the recovered assets will go (and remember, you get to do this for each<\/em> restore group you create in a plan):<\/p>\n\n\n\n You’ll see there are three options \u2013 overwrite the original virtual machine, perform an instant access, or per my choice, restoring as a new virtual machine to a different location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just like for normal virtual machine recoveries, you can choose what is to be done with the virtual disks \u2013 in my case, I chose to restore them as thinly provisioned disks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n But virtual disks aren’t the only things you can configure in a restore group \u2013 you can also setup network mappings, too. If you’ve got a complex virtual machine environment, this will be invaluable for you, and given you can have multiple restore groups in a single restore plan, you’ll get a lot of flexibility for getting the right networks associated with the right virtual machines:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next is a number of additional settings that can be assigned to the restore group:<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s it \u2013 we’re almost ready to complete the setup for the restore group after reviewing the settings:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the restore group is created \u2013 and as I’ve mentioned before, you’re not tied to just a single restore group; you can associate multiple restore groups to the restore plan. (And you can have up to 500 virtual machines in a single restore group!) So if I’d wanted to, I could have added more restore groups, but in this case I could just push on, which let me confirm all the settings before finishing off the plan:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now my restore plan has been created:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, before I kick off the restore plan, I’ll show the current state of the ESX server I’m going to restore to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Going back to Data Manager, selecting the restore plan and choosing Restore<\/strong> lets me view the summary of the plan before initiating:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once the restore plan is running, it can be tracked from the Jobs section. In the example below, I’ve drilled down into the job to see the progress of the individual restores, all started simultaneously:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clicking on any individual job details will let you see information about the specific virtual machine being restored \u2013 including the name assigned to the recovery virtual machine:<\/p>\n\n\n\n And here’s the completed restore:<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Restore-Plan-01.png\")
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