vCenter Lost, how to keep backups running.

[Lunddahl]

Hi!

Well the vCenter server is not really lost, bur i thinking about scrapping my old vCenter 4 for a new fresh vCenter 5 (no upgrade), this is a small setup with 3 hosts, so no external vCenter database.

I could upgrade, but if i would like to use the new vCenter Appliance, there is really no way to upgrade.

How do i change the vCenter server without breaking my reverse incremental backup scheme.

- Ulrik Lunddahl

[Sethbartlett]

If you do a fresh install and not an upgrade, you would have to add your new vCenter into Veeam, edit all your jobs to point to the new VC and VMs, but all your jobs will then have to run fulls. The issue is that we reference VMs but a reference ID that VMWare gives each VM/Datastore/Host/Object and if you do a fresh install, all this information will change.

[mrt]

If you do a fresh install and not an upgrade, you would have to add your new vCenter into Veeam, edit all your jobs to point to the new VC and VMs, but all your jobs will then have to run fulls.

does this apply to replicas, too?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes with v5, but v6 will allow to avoid full replication in that case as you'll be able to map replicas into existing VMs in the DR site. Not sure if you can/want to wait for v6 though.

[Lunddahl]

How about adding the hosts directly to Veeam, will it be possible to keep the ID's then ?

- Lunddahl

[Vitaliy S.]

If you do not migrate VMs from these hosts, then it will be possible to keep the IDs, otherwise every new VM registration in the VI inventory will force the ID to change.

[Gostev]

Yep, VMotion awareness only comes with vCenter.

[ironique]

Hi guys,

I have a client setup on vSphere 4.0 with Veeam B&R 5. I added the vCenter server to Veeam and configured backups for the VMs through the vCenter. Now we need to upgrade the clients environment to vSphere 4.1, which means updating the vCenter too. Is there a way to add the new vCenter server to Veeam and migrate my backup jobs from the old vCenter to the new one without having to configure new jobs?

Appreciate the help.

[mrt]

So if I move a vSphere host from vCenter4 to a new vCenter5 instance, I must reseed all my replicas of the vm's on that host? Is there anyway around this, other than waiting for B&R v6? Thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

The only way to keep replication jobs running is to in-place upgrade your vCenter Server. In all other cases, unique VM identifiers will be lost, leading to full VM reseed requirement.

[ironique]

Just confirming, this applies to backup jobs too I assume?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, this applies to all types of jobs.

[ironique]

Thanks.

[jim3cantos]

Hi (and happy new year)

It seems that we have lost our vcenter appliance (v. 5.1). We had to do a scheduled reboot and now It doesn't want to restart ok. We have backups and replicas of the vm but they seem to have the same problem. I have been able to add individual ESXi hosts to veeam and reconfigurate one of the replication jobs. As expected it creates a new (and full) replica point. I'm thinking about not using vcenter for veeam anymore and this way avoiding also a single point of failure. We have only three ESX servers. What do you think? Any problems or disadvantages with this approach?

thanks.

[dellock6]

Hi Jose,
if you have vmotion and you want to move VMs around to balance resources, at each move the ID of the VM registered in the single ESXi will be changed, and a new full will happen again.
Personally, I'd suggest to rebuild the vCenter configuration (it's just 3 hosts so it shouldn't be a big problem), and test your Veeam backups (ideally with Surebackup if you have at least the Enterprise edition) so you can immediately identify issues like this reboot problem, instead of finding them out only when you need to do a restore.

Luca