In today’s digital world, it’s no surprise that a significant amount of personal and business data ends up being stored on virtualization hosts. Whether it’s personal data, sensitive business data, or anything in-between, you can probably think of at least one occasion when personal data has been accidentally uploaded to a virtual machine (VM). As Data Recovery explains (datarecoverycompared.com), the organization of separate virtual servers, virtual machine host clusters, and virtual machine templates helps organizations ensure that the personal data of only the users who should have access to that data. A virtual server is a VM that runs an operating system and applications on a physical server. To recover data from virtual servers, you start by determining if the data is still on the host server. Here we’ll discuss how to recover data from a virtual environment.
- Storage Level
The first step to recovering data is to ensure that you have a good data backup. Once you determine that the information is still on the host server, you can start to look at options for recovering data. The first thing to do is try looking at storage-level backup methods. The easiest way to find out if your VM has any storage level backups is by using an application such as ESXi’s vSphere Client or VMware vSphere PowerCLI. If there are any storage level backups in place, you should be able to use them. If no storage level backups are available on a particular VM, you should look at restoring from a backup copy of the VM file system image (VMDK).
- LUNS or RAID
The next step is looking at the VM hard drive. If the VM has a hard drive, you can use an application like VMware vSphere PowerCLI to get information about the VMDK file system image and its associated LUNs. Once you have a list of LUNs (or RAID groups), you should be able to use ESXi’s vSphere Client or VMware vSphere PowerCLI to create a new VM. This will create a new virtual machine on the host server with all the data copied over from the original virtual machine file system image (VMDK). Before you can restore data from a VM, you need to determine which type of storage was used on the host server.
- Host File System (HFS)
The host file system level is the next up, with each representing a higher degree of recovery difficulty. In VMware ESXi, two file system types can be used: the host file system and the VMFS file system. The host file system is the native file system used by ESX on a physical server. The VMFS is a virtual copy of the host file system that can be used to store VM files. If you are recovering data from a virtual machine, use ESXi’s vSphere Client or VMware vSphere PowerCLI to look at the disk configuration of each virtual machine. If you find an HFS-formatted disk, you should be able to recover data from it with an application such as ESXi’s vSphere Client or VMware vSphere PowerCLI.
- Storage Architectures
If you are recovering data from a virtual machine, check the disk configuration of each virtual machine and make sure it has a local disk that is formatted in an architecture that can be used to restore data. If the VM is part of a cluster, you will have to look at the cluster settings to determine if any shared disks can be used for recovery.
- Virtual Machine Data Recovery by Ontrack Software
Engineers image drives and reads raw data on the disk, determine the configuration should be, and then virtually rebuild the array and gain access to the data. Ontrack Data Analyzer is a real-time virtual complex drive recovery tool that can recover data from all types of storage media and helps to recover lost data from a damaged hard drive rapidly.
There are many ways to recover data from a virtual machine. VMware vSphere PowerCLI and the VMware vSphere Client are the two primary tools to recover data from a virtual machine. The VMware vSphere PowerCLI offers great functionality that can help with recovery, but it is not always easy to use. There is still hope if you do not have access to any of these tools.