Recovery from accidentally deleted vCenter

[gregheywood]

We are running 5.5 on our hosts and vCenter. and the vCenter VM was deleted by accident from one of the hosts. So we currently have our hosts running in a cluster, with VDS, and no way to manage it properly. The VCDB was on a different VM which is still OK, but I need to get it all up and running again.

In terms of recovery, what would people recommend? Delete the DB's and rebuild from scratch (I have no real need for the historical data)? Or can I reinstall VC and point it to the current VCDB? Also, am I best off at this point migrating the hosts off the VDS to a standard switching? I suspect I will have issues adding hosts to another VC if they are running a VDS created on a different VC?

[vfk · Accepted solution]

Hi, if you have vCenter DB intact, then you can install a new vCenter and point to the existing database.  If you don't have a backup of the system files of the old vcenter then you will have issues with ssl cert.  This might be useful to you http://www.virtualclouds.info/restoring-vcenter-server/

As for VDS, once you have vCenter up and running you can resync hosts.  I would not move back standard switches, here is a good read Distributed vSwitches and vCenter outage, what's the deal?

[gregheywood]

Thanks. Some great links there which gives me more than enough to go on.