Vcenter 5...vm image lost...backup lost...recovery options?

[maleitch]

I apologize for posting this here, but I am not "authorized" to post in any other forum apparently.

Had a catastrophic failure and barring any recovery of the data itself I need to know what kind of issues I am looking at.  Had a Vsphere 5 cluster of 3 ESXi servers with the vcenter virtualized in this same cluster.

My ESXi hosts are still running fine.

What are the ramifications of rebuilding a new Vcenter server from scratch?  What would I lose?

I am running out of time unfortunately.

[Troy_Clavell · Accepted solution]

the good news is that your ESX Hosts don't need vCenter to run. You'll only lose DRS, but if you configured HA for them they will continue to work.  I would rebuild vCenter, using the same hostname and IP.  If your DB was remote, "connect to existing" DB.  If you DB was local, I would say create a remote DB and connect to it.  It makes it a lot easier to recover.  From there, depending on where you DB is, you may need to re-create your clusters, any resource pools, folders and permissions you had.  Your ESX Hosts may need to be added back to inventory.

Good new in all of this, it's not a catastrophic failure.

[maleitch]

Thanks so much for the confirmation Troy.  Helps to ease my mind that I can somewhat recover from this mess.  Hope the rest of my issues have similar outlooks.