Hi Bill,  Good question! What I often tell customers is that if the XMS were lost or destroyed by accident, you can simply do the following to recover the XMS:  1. Deploy new XMS ova VM with equal or greater code of the cluster 2. Upload code image (upgrade-to-4.0.2-80.tar as an example) to the XMS using the xmsupload account and WinSCP 3. Perform XMS install only (from xinstall account in the CLI on the XMS) targeting to code file you uploaded 4. Perform XMS recovery of the cluster  Some of these steps can be a bit of a task if you are unfamiliar with the xinstall (easy install) CLI. EMC Support can assist if this is ever needed.  These tasks are non-disruptive to host I/O on the array. The loss of the XMS will not cause the array to be down. As far as the image-level backup of the VM, I have seen instances where a the backup software used will cause a hang in the XMS requiring a reboot of the XMS. Just be aware of that! Finally, there should be no concerns to the cluster encryption when recovering a XMS as encryption is handled at the cluster level (SED of the SSDs) rather than the XMS level.  Thanks, Chris Mahon, VCP, EMCIE, EMCCA EMC Corporation | Delivery Specialist II
It sounds like deploying the XMS as a VM is the recommended approach.  I presume it is a best practice to use VADP image-level backup software to backup the XMS on a regular basis (nightly?).  Let's assume worst-case scenario, the XMS was not backed up, and for whatever reason the storage array it was running on suffers data loss and the XMS is destroyed.  What is the procedure to build a new XMS and connect to an existing XtremIO Cluster?  Is this a disruptive operation?  Does the cluster get impacted in any way?  Is there a need to have the encryption keys imported, or does the XMS "bypass" encryption?
Loss of XMS VM?