vCenter Recovery

[snowmizer]

I am testing Veeam Backup and Recovery to see how it works with our ESXi 4.1 environment. I have everything set up in Veeam (added vCenter server to manage hosts for backups). My vCenter server is also a VM. Unfortunately while setting up the environment I messed up my vCenter server and now have to recover this server. Problem is that I can't do that through Veeam because it's trying to connect to my vCenter server (which doesn't exist anymore). I thought I would add the standalone host and recover that way but soon discovered that you can't have vCenter and the standalone host in the same server list. To me this causes great problems. Luckily I'm just in a test mode right now and only had one job set up. If I was in production though and had to remove vCenter so I could restore it using the standalone host I'd lose all of my backup jobs, etc...

How have other people handled this issue?

Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

The solution is pretty easy - just use IP address to add the host you're trying to restore vCenter Server to. In this case Veeam backup console will treat this host as a completely new one and you'll be able to restore failed VMs.

Also note that you can use standalone tool called extract.exe to restore VMs from the backup storage even if you don't have a Veeam backup console.