VMware Cloud Community
mmeserve
Contributor
Contributor

Lost vCenter and cannot restore from backup

Hello,

First Question:

Our vCenter server has crashed and we're having issues trying to figure out how to restore it from backup.  We backup to the cloud and our backup solution authenticates through vCenter to backup/restore VMs....so we're not able to restore without vCenter, it seems.  Any ideas?

Second Question:

We have made some VM changes directly on hosts since our vCenter has been lost.  If we restore our vCenter will we lose those changes?  We haven't made any networking changes, we have simply deleted/added a few VMs for the most part.

Thanks for any help!

Matt

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3 Replies
ashilkrishnan
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi

1. Ideally, backup solutions does have an option to directly restore to a ESXi host in such scenarios. Please check for such options in backup application

2. Post restore, these VMs which were removed earlier might come back to inventory as they are stored in vCenter database. They might be listed as invalid as you have already removed the files, so a manual removal from inventory might be required.

Lalegre
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hey mmeserve​,

What backup vendors recommends you as a technique to restore vCenter Server is to add an ESXi host as standalone and recover it there. Most of the backup solutions let you do that as they can also consume ESXi by their APIs.

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IRIX201110141
Champion
Champion

About your 2. Questions

No, your changes arent lost when vCenter comes back again. The vpxd will receive the current state of the ESXi trough the vpxa agent on the host. Its similar as when you choose within the trouble shooting option the Restart Management.

Regards,

Joerg

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