Introducing Virtual Machine Restore Requests: A Leap Forward in VM Recovery

We are excited to share an all-new feature designed to enhance the resilience and flexibility of your virtual machine running in the ITS Private Cloud: Virtual Machine Restore Requests. We understand that accidents happen, configurations change, and sometimes you just wish you could rewind the clock. Now, it is possible.

What’s new?

With the introduction of Virtual Machine Restore Requests, you will be able to restore your virtual machine from storage snapshots. This means, if there’s an error or unintended change to your VM, you can revert back to a specific point in time.

Pricing Transparency

Restore Requests are a pay per use service, you pay a one-time fee for each request. The cost of each request is determined by the virtual machine Provisioned Storage and Storage type:

Provisioned Storage GiB: Amount of storage provisioned to your VM (committed + uncommitted).
Storage Type:

Virtual Machine Restore Request Pricing
Configuration	Description	Price per GB
Storage Tier 1	HDD (per GB)	$0.30
Storage Tier 2	SSD (per GB)	$0.60

To calculate a Virtual Machine Restore Request cost, simply multiply the VM provisioned storage by the storage tier price per GB:

VmRR = (Storage Provisioned in GiB) * (Restore Point Storage Rate per Tier)

For example, let's assume you want to recover two virtual machines: one with 300GB on HDD storage and one with 1.2TiB on SSD storage:

The one-time fee for each request is calculated as follows:

VM Restore request 1: 300GiB * $0.30 = $90.00

VM Restore request 2: 1228.8GiB * 0.60 = $737.28

After restoring a virtual machine, normal virtual machine pricing is charged on a daily basis for the life of the new VM.

Specifications

While we are thrilled to roll out this feature, there are a few things to consider:

These virtual machine restore points are not crash consistent. This means while they are perfect for most rollback situations but they might not capture every last in-flight transaction.
Restore points will be made available on a best-effort basis, with up to 12 snapshots per day for 20 days.

We encourage regular backups for mission-critical data using the Institutional backup service UTORrecover. Restore Requests are a best effort service to be used in emergencies and are not suitable as a replacement for file level backups or vCenter snapshots.

How to access?

Starting today, the Restore Point Requests are available via:

ITS Private Cloud Portal: https://eis-vss.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/VSSPublic/pages/1406042121
Command Line Interface aka vss-cli: https://eis-vss.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/VSSPublic/pages/1406042121 Available from version v2023.10.0.
Python SDK aka pvvss: Available from version v2023.10.0.