My vCenter Server 5.1 appliance crashed and I was using VDP… now what?

19 September, 2012 By 7 Comments

I had this question this week, what if I am using vSphere Data Protection (VDP) and my vCenter Server appliance (VCVA) crashes… well lets just test it.

I just killed my vCenter Server appliance and deleted if from disk. Next step is to get a brand new vCenter Server appliance up and running. So I deploy a brand new VCVA first. As I have pointed my vSphere Client directly to a host I will need to login to the commandline to configure my networking, you can use vami_config_net but also Yast.

/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net

Next I go through the regular setup and configuration steps. Create a Datacenter and a Cluster and add some hosts. Now I see my VDP appliance again in my inventory… but I don’t see those nice shiny VDP icons. So how do I get those back? Well that is simple, just register the appliance to the new vCenter Server:

  • Point your browser to the VDP configuration web page
    https://<ip address or name of vdp appliance>:8543/vdp-configure/
  • Click on the “configuration” tab
  • Click on the lock to unlock the config
  • Now enter your appliance password
  • Provide the new vCenter Server details (in my case they are the same as the old so I just provide the password of the vCenter Server appliance)
  • Reboot the VDP appliance
  • Reboot the vCenter Server appliance

Now open up the Web Client and …

  • Click the “vSphere Data Protection” option in the left pane of your Web Client
  • If you see the “Not Connected” status, click “Connect”
  • That is it… now you can restore VMs again

 

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    Comments

    1. Eric Gray says:
      19 September, 2012 at 18:12

      That is amazingly simple!

      Reply
    2. Totie Bash says:
      20 September, 2012 at 17:08

      Duncan, what if it is the VCVA that crash, can VDP or the old VDR help. I had a crash on the old 5.0 with the old DB2 /storage/db database 20GB partition became full. I tried to rescue it by booting with gparted and increase the partition but the vpxd really won’t start. I started with a fresh one and the only trouble I had was the distributed switch, so I revert them all to standard. My question is what would you have done? Could VDR or VDP offer any help on that scenario?

      Reply
    3. Kris says:
      8 October, 2012 at 12:46

      Hello Dincan!
      What i can do if my vcenter working… or better to say worked ;) )))) on Windows 2008 Server R2 VM?
      Could you give any advice?

      Thank you
      Kris

      Reply
    4. Matthew says:
      5 February, 2013 at 22:32

      The question is.. what if the VM you need to restore is your vCenter VM. Specifically in my case, not a vCenter appliance but a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM running vCenter.

      This VM has been protected with VDP backups but how do I restore the backup if I cannot get into my vCenter web interface?

      Regards,

      Matthew

      Reply
    5. Matthew says:
      5 February, 2013 at 22:34

      Found the following:

      You should be able to recover the vSphere backup from the VDP appliance even if your vSphere server is down:

      Boot the VDP appliance on a new host
      Wait for it to complete booting
      Login in via SSH
      Go to the /mnt/axion//VirtualMachines folder
      You’ll find folders containing the backups for each machine, including the VDP appliance; enable SSH access on your new host and scp the files over to the correct datastore.
      Browse the datastore on the new host and import the VM from there

      source: http://communities.vmware.com/message/2117716

      Reply

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