If you run a remote VMWare server, or a cluster of remote servers, you’ll know that there’s nothing more inconvenient than discovering that a hard drive has failed. Getting the valuable data that you need from your remote server’s faulty hard drive can be a bit of a challenge – especially if it’s no way near where you live.
How do engineers obtain your drives?
Sometimes VMWare data recovery is performed remotely using a series of programs. Sometimes this isn’t possible though if drives have become seriously damaged. You’re then faced with a coupon of problems; you can either pay to have someone remove the faulty drive from your server and ship it to you, or you can remove it yourself. There’s more than one way to ensure you get professional VMWare disaster recovery, of course, but remember that this hardware is very sensitive to vibration, and should only be touched when powered-down. There’s a third option though that people don’t generally tend to consider, and that’s that you can have a server recovery technician go to the location of your server to recover the data there and then.
The third option is often much preferred by most people – especially if they live a great distance from the data center where the server is hosted. Even if you pay to have the drive shipped back to your home address there’s no guarantee it’ll get there in one piece. A couple of bumps or scrapes during the time your drive is being passed through the post and it could mean that you go from being able to rescue the entire contents of the drive, to absolutely nothing on the drive. Therefore it’s clear that the very best option here is to have a data recovery expert attend the hosting center and work on-site on your hard drive.
Keeping Your VMWare Server In Line
You’ll soon realize that data recovery for VMWare applications isn’t particularly cheap. This means that in future you should look to backup your precious files and data as often as possible. There are lots of ways in which you can backup data on a remote server. You can either use a cloud backup service which will run in the background, or you can setup your server using RAID so that one drive mirrors the other completely. Just remember that if something like a lightning strike or power surge is to blame for your VMWare drive failure, the chances are it will take out all of the hard drives within a machine. Therefore just to be on the safe side you could benefit to use a cloud backup service which stores your data well away from your physical server.
The good news is that VMWare recovery is always possible – so no matter what it is that you’re trying to pull off a faulty drive, there’s still a chance that you’ll be able to retrieve it. Remember that HDRA has a 95% recovery rate with VMWare products, and is certified as an official recovery partner.
Contact us here to have a VMWare recovery engineer assess your case.
Here’s a great link to the company site itself on installing the specialized software.
Also, here’s a tutorial video: