Changing VC IP/address

[cnicholson]

How does one go about changing the vcenter server (we've moved our vcenter from one server to another) without losing all of my backup jobs, etc? Is there a file or sql table I can change? We just dropped the VC db and moved it to another server that we've rebuilt. Thoughts?

[Alexey D.]

Hello,

To handle VMs in jobs, Veeam B&R uses unique VMs' IDs which are generated by vCenter and stored in its database. To keep these IDs valid, you need to migrate that database as well. Also you should make sure that vCenter's hostname was not changed. If these requirements are met, B&R will continue working.

Otherwise, you have to recreate your jobs and re-add VMs. Hope this helps!

[cnicholson]

Hmm, these sound like two different things:

1- Make sure that the VM IDs stay the same by migrating the vCenter DB to the new server (done, this has always been a consideration)
2- Make sure the vCenter hostname stays the same.... Well, we've put vCenter on a new server, we've always associated the Veeam conenction by IP for simplicity, there must simply be a place to change this, considering all of the VM IDs are the same, storage locations, CBT information is all the same, etc.

Rarely in a vCenter server migraiton would you keep the hostname the same, it is after all a 'migration'.

[Vitaliy S.]

Provided that you've added vCenter Server to the backup console by IP address and kept the same IP for a new server, then it would also work.

[Gostev]

You could also update hosts file on Veeam Backup server to point old vCenter server name to the new IP address. This way, all jobs should continue to work.

[cnicholson]

Right.. so I understand 'cheating' at an IP level to do this.

First, my new VC server is a different IP, that's not going to change and can't be the old IP of the old VC server as that server is still around doing other things (we created a VC server JUST for VC).
Second, we can't edit the hosts file or DNS or something to make this work, since the old server still needs to be accesible, by name, etc.

Is there anyone that can answer the question of "where does Veeam B&R store these conenctions"? I should simply be able to modify that to use the new IP and we should be set. There is a xml/txt/ini file somewhere or registry entry or something where it stores these conenctions, since I can add a new one, I can modify an existing one, somehow. I just have a dozen B&R jobs on here, all with backup files and CBT info I do NOT want to lose just because I changed the IP (and name) of my VC server. This is a field in a file somwhere, it can't be this hard...

Thanks for the replies so far all!

[Gostev]

All connections are stored in the configuration database located on SQL Server chosen during the product setup. We do not recommend or support manual configuration data modifications. In some cases, our support can assist with required modifications by providing you with SQL script. However, I am not 100% sure if you only need to change 1 configuration parameter to make this all work, as there could be additional dependencies. So really, it is best to go through our support with this. Thanks!

[cnicholson]

Sounds fair, thank you Gostev

[rchew]

We recently upgraded our Virtual Center as well. The database was successfully migrated but we have a different hostname for the server. We kept the same IP address but not the hostname. The Virtual Center was added to all of our Veeam servers using hostname...not IP address. Please tell me there is a simple way to retain consistancy of the backup jobs without deleting and re-creating.

Thank You

Ray

[Gostev]

Just put the old name in the hosts file on Veeam Backup server?

[rchew]

Thanks.

I was thinking about adding an alias in DNS but the host file will work better for us in the short term.

Ray