A graph summarizing the results of a survey on the uses, applications and plans of cloud providers for cloud computing and virtualization.

There is a dupe: “Administrators are divided into two categories – those who do not backup and those who are already doing.”

My personal statistics survey shows that, for the vCenter Server,  Admin takes 80% risk for being in the second category.

It is not critically important to Backup vCenter. What would happen if vCenter is down and not up?

As a first approximation, nothing.

Because even without vCenter, virtual machines continue to work with Storage service requests.

The network sends data packets.

However, one of the following could be unavailable until vCenter return to the system (even new):

1. Ceases to collect statistics of performance, one that is available on the tab Performance.
2. Not going to proceed with the infrastructure – the tab Events.
3. Stop working alarm.
4. Drs cluster stop working.
5. DPM, if so, will cease to work.
6. vMotion and all other migration will no longer be possible.
7. Will cease to work integrated with vCenter program: Converter, Update Manager, Data Recovery.
8. If the switches are distributed, changing their settings will be disabled.
9. In part, this concerns Cisco Nexus 1000V.
10. Not be able to quickly find and insert a virtual machine, if it lies on some of the large number of servers.
11. Will not be able to deploy VM from template

Most likely, we will survive without it, even if we are not able to quickly raise vCenter from scratch.

However, in so doing, we lose:

1. Performance statistics for upto a year – that’s bad for the analysis and infrastructure planning.
2. Lost events with the infrastructure – the tab Events.
3. Lost alarm, we have created manually, and change the existing default (setting warning in the first place).
4. VApp lost clusters and resource pools drs
5. Lose the right cluster, drs
6. Will cease to work integrate with vCenter program: Converter, Update Manager, Data Recovery (you may have to do something else). Some require to reinstall.
7. If the switches are distributed, then their configuration will be lost – that is, when a new vCenter will connect to the server, ESXi create a new distributed virtual switch.
8. In part, this concerns the Cisco Nexus 1000V.
9. Lost certificates.
10. If you are installing vCenter we pointed out the use of ports other than the default – we lose these values.

Moral - we’d better Prestressing and implement same database vCenter backup.

The fact is that if the backup was performed by means of the base before(for example, SQL Express with two clicks in Management Studio Express), it now appears in VMware native tool – Data Migration Tool. This command line is a utility for the distribution of vCenter 4.1, although it works with vCenter since version 2.5.

With it you can save:

• Certificates SSL;
• Ports;
• Data licensing;
• If the database is a SQL Express on the same machine, the backup will be included and the database (for SQL, Oracle and DB2 will still backup the database separately);
• Configuration (not the patch) Update Manager, if installed on the same machine.

When restoring, a backup of the tool itself should establish vCenter, and its configuration.

The utility is intended primarily for migration from the old to the new version vCenter. This is especially true for those who will be on old vCenter on a 32-bit OS, wanting to upgrade to 4.1 on 64bit OS.

This tool will be useful for backup of vCenter and as well as for SQL Express database.