Nimble Clone to Production Volume

[timothy_bopp]

We want to make a Nimble Clone of a Volume take over as the Production Volume in VMware.  Has anyone done this before?

[rfenton4]

Hi Timothy 

A clone is a volume in its own right logically although it is tied to the parent volume from which it was created.

Currently there is no way divorce a clone from its parent 

Can you describe what your trying to achieve so we can understand the use case ?  Presumably you've made changes to your clone and now would like to make that independent and delete the original parent ?

Thanks

Rich 

[amirul93]

Hi Rich,

I am seeing more and more requests for 'splitting' the clone from its parent into its own independent volume. Mainly from devs who work on a clone and then want to promote this to be the main volume.

[rfenton4]

Please capture those request Amirul and reach out to the appropriate account team - they can add these use cases to the Request for Engineering to ensure demand for this type of functionality is captured and prioritised 

[timothy_bopp]

Thanks for the helpful information Rich!

We were trying to restore a production VMware datastore from a snapshot.  We decided the best course of action was to unmount the effecteed production LUN,  present the snapshot clone to VMware as a datastore. We then created a new empty datastore in VMware and Storage VMotioned the vmdks from the clone to the newly created empty datastore. We then deleted the unmounted and the compromised production datastore.

[rfenton4 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for sharing that Timothy - that's a common use case to restore specific vmdks back selectively (as restoring the entire volume from the snapshot would restore every VM which is probably not the desired effect)

Have you seen my single file restore from a VM blog ?  

https://connect.nimblestorage.com/community/data-protection/blog/2013/11/12/easy-single-file-restore-from-a-vm

[marktheblue45]

Break out clone into a Full Fat volume will be excellent. NetApp have this feature and it's one of the things we will miss if this doesn't happen.

[ccolht99]

I would like to add my vote for this feature. I would also like to replicate to a different volume name and within an array (vol copy). This could be done with a replicate, claim and then rename but that won't work on the same array.

Oh and cascading replication would be nice too since we're looking to NetApp for good features...