Another way that Everpure FlashArray snapshots can be utilized via the plugin is that a snapshot can be copied into a new VMFS volume and mounted to a cluster or single ESXi host on the local FlashArray. This is particularly useful for test/dev instances (e.g. creating a copy of a VMFS datastore with recent SQL data for a developer), disaster recovery operations at a remote site, or if one or a few VMs but not all VMs that reside on a particular VMFS volume need to be restored to a previous state.
To get started, select the datastore within vSphere and go to Configure > Everpure > Snapshots. Next, select the desired snapshot that you wish to copy and click on the Copy to New Datastore button. This process is shown in the below image:
From there, the steps to copy the snapshot to a new VMFS volume are more or less identical to how a new VMFS datastore is created. An example of this entire process is depicted in the below sequence of images:
First, a Name is given to the copied datastore (you will not be able to resize the datastore until after this procedure has been completed).
Next, select the ESXi cluster or ESXi host you wish to connect the copied volume to:
Optionally add the volume to be copied to one or more protection groups:
Lastly, optionally assign the copied volume QoS limits and/or to a volume group.
Confirm that your selections are correct and click Finish to copy the datastore snapshot to a new volume.
Once the volume copy, mount and ESXi storage rescan operations have completed, we can see that the copied volume is available for use in vSphere.