Restoring vCenter VM fails (support ID 00446983)

[Dave-Departed]

Hi All,

Had a corrupt vCenter database when I rebooted our vCenter VM this morning, after applying some updates, so chose to restore the vCenter VM to an earlier version from Veeam backup.

I shut down the vCenter VM and attempted to do a restore to original location. It failed with the error "registering restored vm failed error: the specified key name or identifier already exists"

I've tried removing the failed registrations in each ESXi host (our vCenter VM is Fault Tolerant), but I can see that the secondary FT VM still exists, and I can't do anything with it.

Now that I've removed the failed registrations (showing up as 'unknown' VMs on the hosts in question), when I try to run the restore job, I now get: "restore job failed error: the operation is not allowed in the current state".

Can someone please help, as we're without a vCenter server right now!!

Thanks in advance

Dave

[VladV]

You could try restarting the management services for the target esx. If this is not working try restarting the esx altogether.

LE: usually this happens when vCenter has problems detecting the state of the Esx. As yours crashed it may have left something behind.

[Dave-Departed]

Thanks Vlad.

It was something along those lines, yeah. I resolved it myself before Veeam support managed to get in touch (I know they're busy!!). It was a lock file on the .vmx of our vCenter VM, which was causing the FT secondary VM to still be registered. Restarting the management agents on all of my hosts allowed me to move and then delete all files left relating to our vCenter VM and then restore it successfully.

[tsightler]

I'm curious, how are you backing up the FT VM? I thought that enabling FT disabled the ability to snapshot the VM.

[Dave-Departed]

Scheduled task runs a batch file which disables FT before the Veeam backup runs, then upon completion of the backup job, another batch file is triggered, which re-enables FT.

[tsightler]

OK, I expected that answer but had to ask in case there was something I didn't know about. Thanks.