Recovering a Protection Domain snapshot to a VM

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Kees Baggerman·Senior Technical Director at Nutanix – Former Citrix CTP – NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor – 15+ years in EUC

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Yesterday one of our SEs mentioned he was talking to a customer and this customer is using MCS between two separate clusters. They were looking for a way to only keep one image updated and they are then looking to use our Protection Domain to replicate it over to the other cluster. Now, they are looking for some automated way to promote that snapshot to a full VM, luckely this is something we can achieve with the Nutanix Powershell commandlets.  

From the older blogs I’ve written, the following interfaces are available:

• REST API
• HTML5 GUI
• CLI – ACLI & NCLI
• Scripting interfaces (PowerShell)

The following definitions are from the Nutanix Bible as Steve Poitras already explained this:

This script will connect to the specified cluster, remove existing VMs with a certain prefix and will search for the available protection domains and will restore the latest snapshot in the defined protection domain. This will awckomplish what is explained in the first header of this blogpost.

# kees@nutanix.com
# @kbaggerman on Twitter
# https://blog.myvirtualvision.com
# Created on September, 2019

# Setting parameters for the connection
[CmdletBinding(SupportsShouldProcess = $False, ConfirmImpact = "None") ]
 
Param(
    # Nutanix cluster IP address
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
    [Alias('IP')] [string] $nxIP,    
    # Nutanix cluster username
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
    [Alias('User')] [string] $nxUser,
    # Nutanix cluster password
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
    [Alias('Password')] [String] $nxPassword,
    # Protection Domain Parameters
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
    [Alias('PD_Name')] [String] $pdname,
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
    [Alias('VM Prefix')] [String] $vmprefix
)
 
# Converting the password to a secure string which isn't accepted for our API connectivity
$nxPasswordSec = ConvertTo-SecureString $nxPassword -AsPlainText -Force
$nxpassword = $null?
?
Function write-log {
    <#
       .Synopsis
       Write logs for debugging purposes
       
       .Description
       This function writes logs based on the message including a time stamp for debugging purposes.
    #>
    param (
        $message,
        $sev = "INFO"
    )
    if ($sev -eq "INFO") {
        write-host "$(get-date -format "hh:mm:ss") | INFO | $message"
    }
    elseif ($sev -eq "WARN") {
        write-host "$(get-date -format "hh:mm:ss") | WARN | $message"
    }
    elseif ($sev -eq "ERROR") {
        write-host "$(get-date -format "hh:mm:ss") | ERROR | $message"
    }
    elseif ($sev -eq "CHAPTER") {
        write-host "`n`n### $message`n`n"
    }
} 
 
# Adding Nutanix PS cmdlets
$loadedsnapins = (Get-PSSnapin -Registered | Select-Object name).name
if (!($loadedsnapins.Contains("NutanixCmdletsPSSnapin"))) {
    Add-PSSnapin -Name NutanixCmdletsPSSnapin 
}
 
if ($null -eq (Get-PSSnapin -Name NutanixCmdletsPSSnapin -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)) {
    Add-PSSnapin -Name NutanixCmdletsPSSnapin
    write-log -message "Loading the Nutanix CMDlets"
}
?
# Connecting to the Nutanix Cluster
$nxServerObj = Connect-NTNXCluster -Server $nxIP -UserName $nxUser -Password $nxPasswordSec -AcceptInvalidSSLCerts -ForcedConnection
write-log -Message "Connecting to cluster $nxIp"
 
if ($null -eq (get-ntnxclusterinfo)) {
    write-log -message "Cluster connection isn't available, abborting the script"
    break
}
else {
    write-log -message "Connected to Nutanix cluster $nxIP"
}
?
# Removing previous VMs with the site prefix
$VMs = get-ntnxvm -SearchString $vmprefix
?
Foreach ($vm in $VMs) {
        Write-Log -Message "Removing $($vm.vmName) from $nxIP"
        $removeVMJobID = Remove-NTNXVirtualMachine -vmid $VM.vmid
        
        # Make sure the job to remove the VM got submitted
        if($removeVMJobID){Write-Log -Message "Successfully removed $($VM.vmName) from $nxIP"}
        else{
            Write-log -sev Error -Message  "Failed to remove $VM.vmName from $nxIP"
        }
?
}
?
# Grabbing all available protection domains 
 $pds = Get-NTNXProtectionDomain
 write-log -message "Getting all Protection Domain Snapshots"
?
foreach ($pd in $pds) {
        # Collect Snapshot Information
        $snap = Get-NTNXProtectionDomain -Name $pdname | Get-NTNXProtectionDomainSnapshot
        write-log -message "Getting the snashot in the specified protection domain"
?
         #Restore snapshot
        Restore-NTNXEntity -PdName $pdname -SnapshotId $snap[0].snapshotId -VmNamePrefix $vmprefix | out-null
        $VMName = $snap.consistencygroups.split('{}')[1]
        Write-log -message "Snapshot $PDName restored as $Prefix$vmname"
?
 }
 # Disconnect from Nutanix Cluster
 Disconnect-NTNXCluster -Servers $nxIP
 Write-log -message "Disconnecting from cluster $nxIP"

Running the scripts outputs like following:

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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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Kees Baggerman

Senior Technical Director at Nutanix - Former Citrix CTP - NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor - 15+ years in EUC

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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