switching vcenter server, how to continue backup jobs?

[Dude]

Veeam B&R v5
Jobs were created pointing to a vCenter 4 server. I stood up a new server using vCenter 5 which took over all hosts/vms that used to be connected to vCenter 4.
I added the new vCenter 5 server to veeam but how to I edit the jobs such that they will use the new vCenter 5 and still continue their old backups as opposed to starting over with a new set of backups pulled via the vCenter 5 server?

To be clear, the vCenter 4 server the backup jobs were created with no longer has any hosts connected to it. I want to continue running my existing backup jobs in veeam as they are set up now. The only thing I need to do is point the existing backup jobs to the new vCenter 5 server and I can't seem to find a way to do that.

Please advise. Thanks in advance and Happy New Year and all.

EDIT: Found a similar question here: Change VCenter on Existing Backup answer seems to imply that VMs are assigned unique IDs by vCenter which in turn seems to imply that a new backup job will need to be set up in order to backup VMs that have been assigned to a different vCenter from the one that the backup job was originally created with.

[Sethbartlett]

You will need to do some SQL edits to fix this. Please check out this link: HOWTO: Backing up vCenter host issues

[Dude]

Seth, thanks for your quick reply it being New Year's Day and Sunday nonetheless!
Not entirely sure that the post you linked addresses the issue I have since it talks about adding the ESX host. Perhaps that will, in addition to the time-out issue stated in the post you linked, also solve my problem by proxy but that's just an assumption on my part.

However, if I understand you correctly then the message is that there is no way that's already built into Veeam B&R that will allow a user to change the vCenter server for an existing backup job. Now I need to decide whether I want to hack it or recreate the jobs and lose the continuity of my backups by having to start over.

[Dude]

Now that I have looked into this a bit it seems like what needs to be updated is the hostid and the path in BObjects, maybe the objectid as well, not sure how that value comes about.

[Sethbartlett]

You just need to change the RefID's. You can get this through the vCenter. So what you can do is the following:

Code: Select all

$Server = Get-VBRServer | ?{$_.name -eq "name of the new vc"}
Find-VBRObject -Server $Server -name "Name of VM"

This will spit out the VM ref id and name of the VM you are looking at. From there, you need to update the BObjects table to the correct RefID and your jobs will run fine. You can also give Find-VBRObject a string array so you can something like:

Code: Select all

$MyVMs= "Vmone", "vmtwo", "vmthree"

And then just give Find-VBRObject -Name $MyVMs. After this, update the refID's. Does this make sense?

P.S It's not really "hacking" it. It's updating the proper cell(Just one cell for each VM) to fix a fairly simple problem that will save you a lot of time and space(Running fulls if not).

[Dude]

You just need to change the RefID's. [...] After this, update the refID's. Does this make sense?

P.S It's not really "hacking" it. It's updating the proper cell(Just one cell for each VM) to fix a fairly simple problem that will save you a lot of time and space(Running fulls if not).

I updated the object_id in BObjects to vm-31 (for the appropriate VM on the new vCenter server as retrieved by Find-VBRObject) by just editing the table in the database. The result was the the job failed with:

Validating task
Can't process object OIT-DC-GAPPS.
Object OIT-DC-GAPPS not found.

Which makes sense to me as BObjects path and probably also BObjects host_id are still pointing to the wrong vCenter. Just updating object_id doesn't fix that. Unless of course I was supposed to update the object_id in some other place that would then automagically update the host_id and path to the correct vCenter.

I didn't remove the old vCenter from VBR yet because the message made it appear as if I would lose all jobs (that would be ok) and all backups (not ok) if I were to remove the old vCenter from the VBR server list.

[Sethbartlett]

You are correct that you would need to update the host_id also, you can get this from $server.id. If you read the forum post it outlines the fields that need changed to get your jobs fixed

[Dude]

Brilliant, that worked well. Thanks for the assistance, much appreciated indeed!

[mgambetti]

[merged]

godd morning,
we have a veaam v.5.0.2 server backuping up a vcenter 4.1 structure (3xesxi with 30 vms, daily incremental plus weekly full).
we have migrated all the esxi hosts to a new vcenter 5 server,so i have to add this server to servers connection in veeam,ok.
Now i need to tell to veeam somehow to keep doing backup of the SAME vms even if now there are on different vcenter, but it seems that veeam see the "new" vms as different due to the fact that they come from a different vcenter.
I could create a new backup task from scratch, but i dont want to lose the backup history (and, by the way, will i be capable of restoring the old backup when the old vcenter will be gone)?
thank you

[Sethbartlett]

You will need to edit the DB or use powershell(or a mixture of the two) to achieve what you want. Also, it is really unsupported and really digs deep into the workings of our software: HOWTO: Backing up vCenter host issues