Apologies if this is not the right forum.
So I was preparing a new server to host virtual machines. This is a Dell PE r710, Dual quad-core Xeon processors, 48 GB RAM, 2x 72 GB SAS drives. The server has Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 installed. iSCSI volumes hosted in a Dell EqualLogic SAN will host the actual virtual machines. We have 5 of these with similar setups, 3 of which are setup in a cluster. We have 2 set aside for additional projects. These will not be clustered as they will be hosting Lync virtual machines. Anyway we have 1 server setup and working with 2 VM's. The 2nd server will initially host 2 additional VM's. My goal was to format the iSCSI volume on the 2nd server and prepare it to host VMs. Except I accidentally logged into the 1st server (it's one of those days - I was interrupted as I was typing in the server name into Remote Desktop and it auto-populated the first server instead of the 2nd) and begin formatting the volume. Needless to say Lync stopped working and the VMs crashed. I immediately recognized my mistake and stopped the format but obviously it was too late.
I was hoping I could recover the data on that volume. We have a trial of this software called GetDataBack NTFS edition. It can recognize the volume ok and it can scan it and see files. Unfortunately it does not see actual VHD files. Instead what happens is that it sees the VHD files as separate volumes/partitions/etc and recovers the data within the VHD files. Not sure if it should do that, waiting on a response from Runtime. Kind of cool in a way if we ever needed to recover data within a VHD file. Anyway, does anyone know of software that can recover data from a volume but not scan the contents of the vhd file and include that data in the recovery? By this I mean I want to recover the actual VHD files, not the data within. Perhaps Virtual Machine Manager can do something? We do have it installed and manage our VM's with it. It would save us the trouble of re-deploying Lync. Apparently there's a lot of ADSI edits needed to undo the changes Lync did to AD/ Even migrating users back requires some ADSI edits. Trying to find those online someplace just in case.
We did not have backups yet of these 2 VMS as we just recently got them setup and have moved a few users over (some of us from IT). We still had some configuration/tweaking/adjustments to make before migrating the remainder of our OCS users. I know, I know, backup backup backup. The SAN we have can even do snapshots of iSCSI volumes but we didn't even think of enabling it yet.
Regardless in what happens with the VM's, I enabled Windows Server Backup and will immediately setup nightly backups once the VM's are operational again. I will also have our SAN admin enable snapshots, and just for laughs I will also enable snapshots on the individual VM's. We're also currently testing out Data Protection Manager. Kind of wish we already had it implemented....sigh...
Thanks,
Banging my head against a board with a nail in it...