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Migrating your deduplicated (Dedupe) datastore (CIFS and VMDKs) with VMware Data Recovery (vDR) (2016557)

Purpose

This article is intended to guide you through the process of migrating your deduplicated data from one dedupe destination to another. You can use this method to migrate your data from a VMDK to another VMDK, or, from a windows (CIFS) share to a VMDK, although this process is not supported or tested via QA it is provided for educational purposes and troubleshooting only.

Resolution

Note: The resulting dedupe consistency cannot be guaranteed. This method should only be performed for troubleshooting or educational purposes.

These steps assume that the vDR appliance only has 1 CIFS datastore attached, if you have more than one dedupe attached, you need to modify these steps to suit your environment. This also assumes that no other backup windows or operations are being performed, or will be performed on the appliance as this process results in shutting down the vDR service for the duration of the dedupe migration.

Caution: Before performing this operation you should ensure that you have a valid backup of your CIFS dedupe data which has been verified with md5sum or some other form of checksum.
  1. Power off the virtual appliance.
  2. Add a disk to the virtual appliance, it should be below 1TB, and be able to house the CIFS data plus 20% for growth.
  3. Power on the vDR appliance
  4. Connect the vSphere Client to vCenter Server and open the vDR plugin
  5. Click on Configuration, then Destinations
  6. Click /dev/sdb/, then click Format", and click OK.
  7. Connect to the console of the appliance ( root/vmw@re).
  8. Shut down the vDR service:

    # service datarecovery stop

  9. Navigate to the new VMDK dedupe datastore:

    # cd /SCSI-0\:1/

  10. Copy the data from the CIFS dedupe, to this directory.
  11. Start the vDR service

    # service datarecovery start

  12. Reconnect the plugin to the appliance, click on the Restore tab. You should see that the Backup Location is now /SCSI-0:1/.

    Note: If there are no restore points for SCSI-0:1:

    • Console into the appliance
    • Stop the data recovery service

    # service datarecovery stop

    • Navigate to the broken dedupe

    # cd /SCSI-0\:1/

    • Delete the VMwareDataRecovery directory

    # rm -rf VMwareDataRecovery

    • Repeat steps 10-12

  13. Click on the Configuration tab, then on Destinations.
  14. Click on the CIFS export, and click Unmount.
  15. Run an integrity check on the dedupe. Ensure that this process completes successfully.

Impact/Risks

This has not been tested in QA, and as such, VMware cannot guarantee that the resulting dedupe will work with every operation in every situation.

Additional Information

These steps can also be used for the VMDK destination and they may be used to migrate a datastore from a 1 TB to a less than 1TB destination.

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