Vcenter down and no Backups

[defrogger]

Hello, I might be walking into an environment where the Vcenter server is down and there might not be backups.Ive been told there are problems with the Certs and the database.  Now i dont know the details just yet but it got me wondering what would I need to do if I have to bring up a new Vcenter server and there are no database backups and the certs are bad?

I do know some info.  There is about 6 hosts running ESXi 5.1.  There is about 30 VM's running.  There is an HA cluster and Vmotion is setup.  not sure if DRS is or not.

If I needed to bring up a new Vcenter server with new SSO and new Database.  Can i just add the ESXi hosts to the new Vcenter server without there being trouble for the VM's?

Im basically worried about Network Switch configs, storage configs and loosing that info.  Some VMs might need to connect to one network over another.  Would that info get lost and my VM's would loose Network connectivity if i just added them to a new Vcenter server?  Or since the ESXi hosts already have all that info it would be fine and come over?

I dont care about Performance data or any User Roles or permissions, that can all be setup again.

Resetting up the HA cluster shouldnt be a big deal either as im assuming the Cluster info would not come over even though the Hosts have that info?

Hopefully that made sense

Thank

[Alistar · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

you should be totally fine with just re-estabilishing a new vCenter from scratch and connecting the ESXi hosts back again, and then just creating a cluster and putting them in there along with the right configuration for the DRS/sDRS/EVC, etc. This will not affect running Virtual Machines in any way - but just to be safe I recommend doing this out of business hours

The only stuff you will lose is:

• Resource Pools
• VM Annotations
• Custom Folder Organization

The rest is kept within the hypervisor itself - if the VMs were on standard vSwitch, you are fine. If they were on Distributed vSwitch, you will want to export the configuration from a current ESXi host and then apply it vCenter-wide via export-import again. Some useful links on that: VMware KB: Exporting/importing/restoring Distributed Switch configs using vSphere Web client and : Distributed vSwitches and vCenter outage, what's the deal?

[defrogger]

Thats what I was hoping.  Thanks, Ill have to check if there using distributed switch's or not, thanks for the article on exporting that.