I had a serious problem because a critical VM (the VMware vCenter of a secondary site) got corrupted (maybe due to an HW problem). I restored two different copies of the same VM from 2 different backup jobs and both restored VMs started in blue screen (BSOD). I was lucky because at least a replica powered up normally (with warnings about the VMFS file system).
I can’t exclude that the VM was corrupted before backup, but at backup time the VM was fully functional.
My questions, now, are:
Given that either backup and restore completed successfully, how can I ensure that the backup of a critical VM is suitable to start after restore? I can schedule as many backup and/or replica jobs I need, but I must ensure that a functional copy of the VM can be restored.
Given that the problem occurred with the backup of a VMware vCenter (hosted by a Windows server) is there any best practice to backup the VMware vCenter?
Should I perform an offline manual restore every few days or is there a smarter solution?
SureBackup is exactly what you're looking for. It will automatically do a full restore and make sure the VM boots and services start (if you configure it to do so). You can schedule that to happen as often as you like.
Assuming your backups are being done with AAP enabled that's all that should be required to get a clean backup.
I'm assuming when you say you got VMFS file system warnings you mean NTFS? A Windows vCentre server doesn't have anything to do with VMFS at all