Emergency Restore – VDP 5.5 (Case Study)

Characters : TOM & JERRY ( TOM helps JERRY here…and *NO FUN*, all SERIOUS) 

JERRY:

• My vCenter is crashed and unable to start/connect
• I also have a crash on one of my production VM.
• The VM is business critical and need to be restored immediately. Of course, I have protected it through VDP 5.5
• But VDP is tightly integrated with vCenter. Will I be able to restore my production VM, even when vCenter is down ?

TOM: Yes, It is possible to restore your production VM without vCenter, with the cool new feature called ‘Emergency Restore‘ in VDP 5.5

JERRY: Thats great!. Where do i start now ?

TOM:

• First login into vdp-configure page of the VDP appliance (https://<ipaddress-of-VDP-appliance>:8543/vdp-configure/)
• Click on ‘Emergency Restore’ tab and check if your production VM is listed

JERRY:

• Yes, I could see my production VM listed from one of the 6 VDP appliances in my environment
• Where can i restore the VM to ?

TOM:

• You can restore the VM only to the ESXi host on which VDP is residing
• Make sure of these pre-requisites now
  • DNS of VDP should be able to resolve its hosting ESXi host name
  • The ESXi host on which VDP is hosted should be disassociated from the vCenter, by connecting to the host directly through vSphere client -> Summary -> Host Management -> ‘”Disassociate Host from vCenter“

JERRY: I have no track of the ESXi host where my VDP resides. Also i have DRS enabled on the cluster, so VDP might be on any of my 32 hosts. Can’t VDP identify it automatically ?

TOM:

• Currently VDP cannot identify its hosting ESXi automatically. I have requested a feature for this.
• You have no option left other than connecting to each host directly through vSphere client and then disassociate the ESXi host on which VDP resides.

JERRY:

• With a bit of pain, I could identify the specific ESXi host and disassociate it from the vCenter. Worth it, if I can recover my VM successfully from VDP

TOM:

• Sure, I can help you with that. Follow the steps as mentioned below.
• Goto VDP configuration Utility(https://<ipaddress-of-VDP-appliance>:8543/vdp-configure/) -> Emergency Restore tab.
• Select the VM and ‘Restore-point’ you would like to restore. Click ‘Restore’, which allows you to enter the ESXi host details on which VDP resides as in screen below
• 
• In the above screen, it would have been nice if VDP could detect the ESXi host automatically. (Feature Requested)
• You may notice an error like this if the ESXi host is not disassociated from the vCenter (below screen)
• 
• In the next step, you need to provide a name for the VM being restored and the destination datastore. If you are in this screen, means that VDP successfully resolved its residing ESXi host to proceed further
• 
• Now restore will be started and you can monitor the status in the loading bar (screens below)
• 
• 

JERRY: Perfect ! Glad that VDP provides such a nice feature called ‘Emergency Restore’. (Restore a backed up VM even in case if vCenter is down).  KUDOS !!!!!!!!!