What happens if I restore an old backup of vCenter Database

[TimothyGaray]

Speaking hypothetically, if we had to restore a week-old backup of the SQL Server vCenter database, what would happen?

We are running vCenter 4.1 with a SQL Server database (separate machine).  We have 65 hosts and a total of 780 VMs across multiple locations.

We've been discussing our backup and DR strategies recently and just wondered how critical it was to be able to restore the vCenter database up-to-the-minute?  Most settings do not change very often.  The biggest thing I could see would be VMs vmotioned to different hosts or storage - how would that appear in vCenter if it was restored to a week-old database?

Thanks!

-Tim

[Troy_Clavell]

you may also see alot of "orphaned" objects in your inventory that may have been in your new DB, but not in your old.

[TimothyGaray]

So a newly deployed VM that is still running on a host but not in the week-old vCenter database would show up as orphaned?  We weren't sure if it just wouldn't be there in vCenter or if vCenter would poll the hosts once it was started again and find the running VM it did not know about before.

-Tim