Feature Request - Failover backup communication from vCenter

[saintdle]

I've had two customers where for various issues their vCenters had issues, so Veeam backups failed as it couldnt talk to vCenter. However the ESXi hosts have been up and running perfectly.

Is is possible in the future to be able to provide credentials for VMware ESXi hosts, and should vCenter be unavailable, Veeam goes and hunts where the VM's are on each ESXi host and still backs them up. Obviousloy logging the fact its had to do this.

[scidoner]

I'm not sure the storage APIs which Veeam uses for backup are available without vCenter.

[Vitaliy S.]

I believe this could be an option, but in this case all backup jobs will start doing full backups, because VM IDs are completely different within the vCenter Server and ESXi hosts.

[saintdle]

I believe this could be an option, but in this case all backup jobs will start doing full backups, because VM IDs are completely different within the vCenter Server and ESXi hosts.

Personally I don't see this is as a bad trade off.

As after that backup and been notified you should look into the issue as well.

Maybe it could be an option you tick rather than on by default

[veremin]

There would be even two full backup cycles: first when you switch from vCenter to ESX(i), second when you switch back. So, for many of our customers that might result in repository being overfilled.

Anyway, thank you for sharing your thoughts; much appreciated.

[Vitaliy S.]

As a workaround for now, you can copy your existing jobs (including all the settings) and then configure them to use standalone ESXi host connections. In order to do that, you need to add ESXi hosts via IP address and add VMs to the jobs you've cloned via that connection. Thanks!

[larry]

You can add a script on failure of VC backup job start failover job, then it will only run if main job failed.

[dellock6]

At least for the MorefID part of this discussion, actually ESXi IDs are maintained even when the host is connected to vCenter. Simply, vCenter IDs are used. But if both vCenter MorefID and ESXi IDs are stored somehow, I think it would be possible to "failover" to ESXi IDs if vCenter is not available.
However, I see vMotion as a possible issue as ESXi ID will be changed at any host change. This could not easily solved as, if vCenter is down, we don not have any way to track back where the VM has moved based on the vCenter ID (vCenter is down) neither the ESXi ID (changed since last time we checked maybe). Also HA could kick in, without vCenter being u and running.

I see this as a complicated solution, subject to errors in its behaviour, and with limited use cases.

[saintdle]

Fair enough, it was just a suggestion, as I'd been thinking about it since coming across a vcenter down issue for two customers who then missed backups. Thats why'd I thought I'd post on the forums as I know that I'd get great feedback as above.

Thanks for looking at this request though,