Virtual Center crashy - maintenance options?

[bKeen]

Virtual center is crashy and it's databases are easily corrupted, as I've experience over the years. How do I do proper maintenance on it to keep such below happenstances from occurring in the future? How can I rebuild the database without doing a reinstall or restore?

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My VirtualCenter Server was out of commission, since I couldn't do a reasonable amount of work on it before it crashed and needed to "net start vpxd" (restart the VMware VirtualCenter Service)

The errors that I saw in the event log seem related to database integrity.:

< An unrecoverable problem has occurred, stopping the VMware VirtualCenter service.

Check database connectivity before restarting. Error: Error[VdbODBCError] (-1) "ODBC

error: (08S01) - [ODBC SQL Server Driver]Communication link failure" is returned when

executing SQL statement "UPDATE VPX_ENTITY SET NAME = ? , TYPE_ID = ? , PARENT_ID = ? WHERE ID = ?".>

Anyway, the database is local. It's using the express version of MSSQL (Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine), which was recommended or at least the default option when I first installed it. I downloaded the "SQL Server Management Studio Express" to defrag the DB and do a few other things the knowledge bases suggested, but to no avail. (the db was indeed heavily fragmented and I was able to shrink the size of the DB from 500 to 425 mb)

Further troubleshooting left me long in the tooth. Not really having a clue, I thought rebuilding the database from scratch would be pertinent, so I "vpxd -b" to recreate the database repository - still had a 500mb database file, but now VirtualCenter wouldn't start at all. In the end, I just did a restore from 16 months ago. After the initial setup last year, I backed up the "MSSQL$MSDE_VC" and the "vmware" folder in program files. After disconnecting/reconnecting the hosts and cleaning up a few orphans, I'm fully operational

I may have significant changes in the future and my last fix may not be a option next time.

[VirtualNoitall · Accepted solution]

Hello,

There are too many variables but your experience is the exact opposite of our ours, we have thousands of virtual machines, and we do very little other than:

Using a real version of MS SQL Server installed on a separate server

Nightly backups and weekly index optimizations

Having said that though if your environment is small then co locating SQL Express and VC is not a problem provided the server has the resources to serve both.

[weinstein5]

Virtualnoitall's experience is what I have experienced with other customers - how many hosts and VM are you managing with your VC server?

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[bKeen]

My environment is small - only 25-30 VMs

So I will continure to make backups (c:\program files\Microsoft SQL Server && c:\program files\vmware) and/or look into the backup and maintaience abilities of the "Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express" app