Backup without VCenter

[SunkistDavid]

Is there a way to setup the backups not to use the VCenter server and instead log into the host ESX server and back-it-up?

We had a situation where our VCenter went down and all our backups went bad so we want to have our backup jobs point directly at specific ESX Host Servers and not use VCenter. Possible?

[dellock6]

Hi,
it's possible if you register the single ESX server in the Veeam Backup Server, but why do you want to do that? If some VMs moves on another host maybe because of vMotion or DRS, jobs will permanently fail, while a single vCenter failure will affect only that specific backup run.

Luca.

[SunkistDavid]

Performance - Won't we get better performance pointing directly at the Host versus the VCenter. Our VCenter is a VM that is located on a middling ESX Host where we have some other hosts that are better performance machines. Unfortunately, we do not have VMotion or DRS capability at this time.

Q1: You think this is correct based on my reply
Q2: What basis is Veeam using the VCenter? As a locater or is actually having data pushed through it during the backup job

[RH832]

We found backuping up our SQL server, which our vcenter server uses, would fail due to VSS freezing then causing a problem with vcenter which then killed the veeam job. Solution was to backup the SQL server using ESX directly. This is one instance we found were it was needed.

[tsightler]

Q2: What basis is Veeam using the VCenter? As a locater or is actually having data pushed through it during the backup job

Simply as a locater and cerntal place to request snapshots, etc. No data is pushed through vCenter.

[SunkistDavid]

Why then when our VCenter rebooted as part of an ESX host reboot cause jobs to fail that were pointed at VM's located on other ESX hosts?

Error: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond VCenter IP:443

and

Task failed Error: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it VCenter name:443 (This job was 50% through backing up an Exchange Server)

Thus it seems that Veeam is using VCenter much more than just a locater and central place to request snapshots it looks like it is participating in the backup with some sort of data stream other than location (which should already be known) and snapshot processor.

[tsightler]

Having a connection to vCenter doesn't mean that the data stream goes through it. Logging into and enumerating vCenter is a relatively slow process, each process connects to vCenter and maintains that connection for the duration of the backup. Veeam sends commands over this already existing channel rather than opening and closing the connection each time. Certainly there are also various other control traffic that go across this channel (that's the "etc" in my post above), but it's not the data stream. If you're using hotadd, the data stream doesn't traverse the ESX mgmt interface or vCenter server.

[domenicalvaro]

[merged]

Does anyone know what impact rebooting the vCenter Server, or restarting the vCenter Server service, has on backups currently in progress?

[foggy]

Domenic, in case you need to reboot the vCenter server, the best practice would be to temporary disable backup/replication jobs (configured through vCenter Server), so they do not start while vCenter is not accessible. Once you're done with vCenter maintenance, enable all the jobs back.