Objective 7.5 – backup and restore virtual machines

Describe different backup and restore procedures and strategies

Host configuration can be saved to recover a failed host; host profiles help here too. ESXi can be reverted to a previous boot image.

Backup inside the guest; unnecessary resource utilisation and potential vSwitch bottleneck.

Backup agent in the service console; extra load in the service console may affect performance.

VMware Consolidated backup (VCB) / VMware Disaster recovery (VDR); utilised snapshots fopr backup. VCB uses VMware converter to restore virtual machines, VDR has builtin functionality. VCB requires a physical server which has access to the storage hosting the virtual machines, does file level backup of Windows and image level backup of Linux. VDR does full and incremental image backups of virtual machines.

Create, delete and restore snapshots

Snapshot are created via vSphere client.

Within the snapshot manager ‘go to’ will revert to a previous snapshot or original virtual machine state, ‘delete’ will commit the changes of the latest snapshot, ‘delete all’ will commit all snapshots for that particular virtual machine.

Install backup and recovery appliance

VDR appliance can be installed via the OVF import functionality; file >deploy OVF template > file or Url.

VDR requires ESX/ESXi 4.x or newer and vCenter server. Backups are stored on a virtual hard disk or CIFS share.

Install vCenter data recovery plug-in

Port 22024 must be open between the vSphere client and the appliance for the plug-in to work.

Create a backup job with vCenter data recovery

Job components

Valid backup objects are:

• Datacenters
• Folders
• Hosts
• Resource pools
• Virtual machines

Backup Storage:

• CIFS
• virtual disk

Backup schedule:

• default Monday > Friday evenings and anytime Saturday and Sunday. Virtual machines which miss the backup window have a higher priority in the next window.

Backup retention:

• Specified by the administrator

VDR uses de-duplication too to save space.

Performing test and actual restores using VDR

Restore options:

• datastore to recovery to
• restore configuration or not
• virtual machines vNIC connected or not
• virtual machine powered on