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Cryptz
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

VDP - Backing up Vcenter Server or Restore if vcenter dies

Many of my customers have very simple installs with a single SAN.

I have a test environment right now where I have 2 esxi hosts and a san. One of the hosts has a local datastore. I am using the local datastore to house VDP and my backups. The idea being 1 this is a lab and 2 if i lose the SAN i probably wont lose the local datastore.

That being said i have 2 issues.

1. First i cannot add the vcenter server to the backup job. I suppose this could possibly be by design given my next question

2. Can you restore anything without the vcenter server? The file level recovery allows you to log directly into the VDP appliance from a protected host. My main purpose of a vm level backup is to restore everything if i lose the datastore. So if i have a virtualized vcenter server (i assume most do) and i lose my primary datastore i am going to lose both the protected virtual machines and the vcenter server. I have not going to lose the VDP data since it would reside on a seperate datastore. Can you initiate a restore directly from the VDP appliance without vcenter? If not this seems like a glaring oversite that should be changed. I would prefer to be able to backup vcenter with VDP and initiate a restore of vcenter directly from the VDP appliance if i lose everything.

Also are there any plans to make vdp managed from the vcenter client, the web client is not that great compared to the standard client.

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9 Replies
GSparks
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Good afternoon -

Without the vCenter, you would not be able to do restores.  If the vCenter dies, using VDP configure, you could switch vCenters and in that case, we preserve the older backups and you could restore from those backups to new VMs.

Thanks.

-Greg Sparks
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Cryptz
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

thank you,

just for clarification:

1. Is it therefore intentional that you cannot add a vcenter vm to a vdp backup? I am not able to do so but the other vms backup fine. I am unable to select the vcenter server as one of the servers being backed up. i recieved a generic error once i try to save the job.

2. Do you need to have multiple vcenter servers configured ahead of time? If you have a single vcenter server and that dies can you completely recreate a vcenter server from scratch and utilize/import the existing backups?

thank you

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snekkalapudi
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

You cannot initiate a restore directly from VDP appliance without vcenter

-Suresh
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resteves
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

This was possible using VMware Data Recovery right? How come this regretion?

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mavink
Contributor
Contributor

You should be able to recover the vSphere backup from the VDP appliance even if your vSphere server is down:

  • Boot the VDP appliance on a new host
  • Wait for it to complete booting
  • Login in via SSH
  • Go to the /mnt/axion/<your vsphere name>/VirtualMachines folder
  • You'll find folders containing the backups for each machine, including the VDP appliance; enable SSH access on your new host and scp the files over to the correct datastore.
  • Browse the datastore on the new host and import the VM from there
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schepp
Leadership
Leadership

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snekkalapudi
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Restore a VDP backed up VM without vCenter is possible now with a feature called 'Emergency Restore' in VDP 5.5.

I have detailed it in my blog - Emergency Restore &amp;#8211; VDP 5.5 (Case Study) | { OneVirtual }

-Suresh
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wayneoakley-msi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

i concur with snekkalapudi.

i had occasion to recover 36 virtual machines from the emergency restore in v5.5 from 2 VDP appliances with great success.

the restores are very fast and i ran 3 concurrently, had them all back in about 6 hours.

one thing to be aware of is that emergency restore happens on the same host as the VDP appliance is running and that host cannot be managed by a VC, you have to tell the host to forget about the vc while the restores are in progress.

afterwards i found that all 2008 and higher windows servers needed to be rejoined to the domain and they all wanted their licenses renewed, need to follow up on why but that is what happened.

all-in-all very please with the product.

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wayneoakley-msi
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

forgot to add that the vc was also recovered and booted without apparent error but i cannot connect to it with vi client or web client just no vc

had to replace but keep the recovered one to try and figure out what went wrong.

have to try another recovery sometime and see if the vc works aftwards.

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