How to protect the vCenter appliance with Hybrid Workloads | Druva

How to protect the vCenter appliance with Hybrid Workloads

This article applies to:

OS: VMware Photon
Product edition: Phoenix Cloud
Feature Category: VMware
Workload: VMware

Potential Problem:

Post snapshot restores of a vCenter appliance virtual machine the vCenter application services will not start or are in an inconsistent state.

Issue

The snapshot taken of the vCenter appliance virtual machine is not application-consistent due to the operating system, and database technology in use on the system. This backup is what is commonly referred to as ‘Crash consistent’.

Per VMware vCenter Server Appliance Data Integrity Best Practices “The recommended backup and restore process for the vCenter Appliance is done through the VAMI”.

Backup Procedure

To properly protect the VMware vCenter appliance it is recommended to follow the procedure below.

Disable any VM level backups of the vCenter appliance from the Druva Console.
Determine the destination, and protocol for the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) backup.
- Please reference the VMware documentation for your vCenter version. Below is an example for vSphere 7.0.
  Considerations and Limitations for File-Based Backup and Restore
Configure a VAMI backup of the vCenter appliance to the desired destination.
- Please reference the VMware documentation for your vCenter version. At the time of this article, the link below has data for vSphere 6.5 and 6.7.
  vCenter Server Backup and Restore
Below is an example of an SCP configuration on vCenter 6.7.
Deploy and configure a backup of the destination using either the Fileserver agent or NAS agent depending on the destination for the VAMI backup.

Restore Procedure

To recover the VMware vCenter appliance it is recommended to follow the procedure below.

Restore the files for the needed date from the Druva cloud.
Below is an example restore selection from a linux file server.
- Ensure that the entire directory is selected to be restored as all files will be needed for a successful recovery.
Once the data has been restored please reference the VMware documentation for your version.
vCenter Server Backup and Restore
- The general process is as follows:
  1. Launch the vCenter Server Appliance installer
  2. Select the ‘Restore’ option
  3. Follow the wizard to enter all the details of the backup data to restore.
  4. Enter details for the restore target. Usually an ESXi host.
  5. Select the target location and deployment size. The installer generally reverts to the deployment size of the previous appliance, but it is possible to increase it at this time. However, it is not recommended to shrink the deployment size of the appliance during a restore.
  6. Verify the information on the final screen and click finish. This will begin the data restoration/transfer process. Depending on the size of the appliance, and several other factors this restore can take quite some time.