ESXi 4 Disaster Recovery Scenario

[Highspeedlane]

We are brand new to VMware. What we have is only the ESXi hypervisor (running on a Dell PowerEdge R900) and use the VMware Client software for guest VM management.

The question is - is it possible through some VM utility to create a backup of the hypervisor configuration settings?

We use a third party utility to back up the VM server guests (Windows Server 2003), but it is not able to do this for the hypervisor. As of now if there were a crash, I would have to re-install the hypervisor from scratch, and I would think all the settings currently in the hypervisor that specify perameters and settings of the virtual guests would be lost and would have to either be recovered from some form of snapshot backup or file download from the hypervisor or reinstalled from a locally made list of all the hypervisor's settings.

If anyone has a link to the relevant tutorial or an explanation for recovering hypervisor settings in the event of a system crash, your help is greatly appreciated.

[bulletprooffool]

I am guessing thta you have just the one isolated host.

If you really wanted to, you could configure a new build of your ESX solution onto a USB key / SD card, then simply use a tool like WinImage to duplicate this. You will then be able to recover from a crashed installation but moving storage etc and remounting the nbew USB /SD (in the event of the crash having been due to crashed ESX installation)

The down side is that any changes to the config will require you to redo the backup process.

[ThomasMc]

We use vMA for that very thing and I had a chance to test it all out after a problem with 4.1u1 upgrade via VUM. Everytime we change something on our hosts we login to vMA after about 30 mins and bark;

vicfg-cfgbackup --server x.x.x.x -s configBundle-ESXix.x.x.x.tgz

to grab the latest bundle and to restore we;

1. Install ESXi

2. Take note of DHCP address

3. Back to vMA and do vicfg-cfgbackup --server x.x.x.x -l configBundle-ESXix.x.x.x.tgz

4. Process will restart the host and when it's back online, everything is like it was before

You can also use PowerCli to do the same

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You can use the following cmd-lets from the PowerCLI to backup and restore your config http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/PowerCLI/PowerCLI41U1/html/Get-VMHostFirmware.html http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/PowerCLI/PowerCLI41U1/html/Set-VMHostFirmware.html

[Highspeedlane]

Thanks all for the extremely helpful advice. I will try the vMA first this morning and see if I can get that to do the trick. Otherwise, use the other suggested techniques. Thanks again.

[Highspeedlane]

I was able to generate the configuration .tgz file. Do you know where that file resides once created? I would like to be able to export it to an off-server location for safekeeping. I searched the vMA data store but it's not readily visible there.

Sorry for the noob questions but really appreciate the help.

[ThomasMc]

If you just logged into putty and ran the command then it should be in /home/vi-admin as it just gets copied to your current directory.

[Highspeedlane]

Thanks for that help, found the file.

What I need to do now is transfer that file to a windows workstation (in the same domain as the vMA). Is there a utility that allows me to transfer that file from the vMA to either a windows domain workstation or a windows network share? Again, thanks for the help.

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

You can use something like Winscp or pscp (part of the putty utils).

[Highspeedlane]

WinSCP works perfectly for this scenario, thanks.

Thanks to all for contributing very helpful info on this question.