Kroll Ontrack has announced data recovery capabilities for VMware® Virtual SAN™ (VSAN). Only on the market since March 2014, Kroll Ontrack has successfully recovered data from several hard disks that were managed by VSAN for a client in the Netherlands. In a combined team effort by Ontrack Data Recovery engineers from around the world, Kroll Ontrack was specifically able to recover all the data stored in the virtual machines from a total of 15 disks and three SSDs.
“Since VSAN is so new, we are very proud that we were able to completely recover virtual machines from VSAN hard disks for the first time,” said Paul Le Messurier, Programme and Operations Manager at Kroll Ontrack. “With newly gained knowledge, we developed a toolset for these systems, and can now handle new VSAN recovery requests in an expedited fashion.”
In the initial Virtual SAN recovery case, one SSD failed which caused one of the three nodes to fail, and that took down the entire VSAN storage system. As a result, four large virtual machines comprised of valuable business data were lost.
In VSAN architecture, a node is a server host device, which can contain up to seven hard disks and one SSD flash drive. In this case, the VSAN storage system consisted of three nodes with five magnetic disks and one SSD each. Since VSAN manages and stores all data in a combined storage pool, Ontrack Data Recovery engineers had to recover the complete data from all of the 15 disks and virtually rebuild the storage pool to recover the missing data. To do so, Ontrack Data Recovery engineers had to develop a brand new solution to find, combine and rebuild all the needed description files and log files to rebuild the desired virtual machines.