Is vDP useful for disaster recovery?

[HenrikElm]

I have learned that a vDP appliance can not mount an existing target disk created by another vDP appliance. Now, if I use a separate external iSCSI solution as target for my image backups and I lose vCenter and all primary datastores I have no use of my target BLOB in order to do a restore as it can not be reconencted to a newly installed vDP?

If this is true, is the solution to also place the appliance itself (the vDP VM) on said iSCSI storage together with its backup-target-BLOB and when the primary datacenter is burned to the ground I rebuild it and re-register the vDP VM from the iSCSI storage, boot it up, log in with a web browser to it, register it with the new vCenter and restore the backups from the web-GUI in vCenter?

Please say if this is the right way, else I see no use whatsoever for vDP as it is useless as a disaster recovery solution if I can not recover with only the backup at hand?

Best regards

Henrik

[elgreco81]

Wow! I didn't know that!

After reading your question I checked the administrator's guide (pag. 57)

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vmware-data-protection-administration-...

It looks like you should "shut down" your appliance and then back it up. I was expecting something like a "fresh deploy" of the appliance, some restore from a DB backup and then just start restoring your VMs...but nop...

I was trying to help and you helped me with your question LOL!!!

Regards,

elgreco81

[mcowger]

It IS useless as a disaster recovery solution, because thats not what its designed for.  Its designed as a backup solution.

If you want a disaster recovery solution, take a look at SRM or Veeam or Zerto.

[elgreco81]

Hi,

Shutting that VM down and making a backup of it, wouldn't do the trick? In that case it wouldn't be "useless" and you wouldn't have to add another product.

Regards,

elgreco81

[HenrikElm]

But... The manual above talks about taking a backup of the appliance for disaster recovery. What good is that backup if it does not mean that it can be restored and used?

Again, if I place the vDP VM on a separate storage iSCSI array (negating the need above as I see it) together with its backup target disks, I should be home right? When the primary datastores burns, I reconnect the array to the newly bought hardware,register vDP with the new vCenter and restore the VMs from the vDR backup that survived the fire?

Where am I wrong here? What step? Please?

/Henrik

[elgreco81]

I don't think you are wrong. As you say, it wouldn't have any sense to have a backup and not being able to restore it. The documentation talks about how to make a backup for your vDP appliance. In case your Datacenter burns (hope not ), you should be able to first:

1) Restore your vDP appliance

2) Restore your backups using the restored vDP appliance

I've never heard anything like you cannot have a "new" vDP to restore VM backups made with other vDPs, also, I've never read anything that says the opposite.

Reading the documentation, I understand that a backup and recovery of your vDP is possible, the only use I can think of doing that is to restore your backups and not having to configure everything again. Otherwise, why even bother to make a backup&recovery for your vDP.

Sorry that I can not tell you something like "yes, I did it several times and worked every time"...hopefully some guru would be able to help you further. What's cool about the scenario you talk about is that it's the first question one should ask "how to restore" and that it also involves a crash of your vCenter...

I will follow this post as I'm also really intreged...

Regards,

elgreco81

[HenrikElm]

Yes, it is very strange and I would guess that we all need 100% clear answer to this question if we would like to keep our jobs the day disaster strikes.

I will use my lab and do this:

- Set up vDP, place the appliance and its datadisks on an external iscsi array

- Take a backup of a VM

- Reinstall vCenter and the ESX hosts in the lab to simulate a disaster, keeping my iscsi array intact

- Re-register the vDP VM in vCenter from the iscsi array. Start it up. Browse to it with Firefox and reregister the vCenter from the appliance, hoping it will appear in the web client again

- Restore the VM I backed up

- Done. Hopefully..

Would this all make sense?

Will post back as soon as I have found the time to do the test..

/Henrik

[elgreco81]

That makes sense! Funny that you asked the question and now it's going to be yourself the one that answers it LOL

Please post your results!

Thank you!

elgreco81

[HenrikElm]

So, I finally found time to do this. I started easy (I thought..) and created a backup of a VM, deleted the VM, removed vDP from the inventory and kept my vDP appliance and its data disks on a datastore with intact hosts while I reinstalled vCenter to simulate a crash of only vCenter. After this I registered my hosts and registered my vDP appliance VM, browsed to it and had it re-register with vCenter as to insert itself into the web-GUI client again, which it did. So far, so good.

Then I used the web-gui to try to restore my VM from backup, but it simply said that there were no restore points in it! Although it was the same vDP with the same datadisks, it seem to have lost its backups! Somehow it must be intimately connected to the vCenter instance itself in such a way that vDP can not be "relocated" to another (reinstalled) vCenter. Not only can a new vDP appliance not connect to existing datadisksfrom another appliance, it seem to be unable to reregister with vCenter even if it is intact as a VM. Sigh...

If I'm correct, vDP is very sensitive and you fully need to understand what it can be used for, that is simple backup and restore as long as everything else is intact. I for one will not be able to recommend it to clients as it is useless as soon as you reinstall (or upgrade??) vCenter for some reason.

Did I do something wrong, or is this expected behaviour?

/Henrik

[HenrikElm]

Oh! I may have been too quick to rule out the disaster recovery scenario! Reading more carefully the vDP manual, on page 42 it says that the appliance rolls back to the last known checkpoint when a sudden shutdown is detected. That may have meant that upon boot it was rolled back to an initial state that was created before I made any backup at all! That would explain why it seemingly lost all the backups.

I will obviously need to do another test, manually creating a checkpoint before I simulate my disaster. :smileyblush:

Will post back when I have done this!

/Henrik

[elgreco81]

Hopefully is as you say! I'm following your posts in this discussion very closely as I'm also really intriged.

Thanks for your effort!

elgreco81

[HenrikElm]

Heureka!

After I took the first backup, I this time created a manual checkpoint in vDP. Then I reinstalled vCenter and reconnected the appliance to have it register with the GUI and sure enough the backup was there and I could restore VMs with no trouble.

So, the conclusion here must be that the vDP appliance IS "portable" as long as you keep the appliance VM and its datadisks together. Make sure to deploy the actual vDP VM appliance on the backup datastore itself so you can reregister it intact with the datadisks when you have rebuilt your datacenter after a fire! Else you have no use for the backup!

Rule to remember: Keep it together, man! :smileylaugh:

Lesson lurned and restore verified! :smileygrin:

/Henrik

[elgreco81]

Great!!! So we didn't lost a great tool for our backups

I will never forget this rule 'cause of your "keep it together" :smileygrin:

Thank you so much for your time to do the testing and posting about it!

Regards,

elgreco81