In some cases, when we need a highly available vCenter Server, we can use vCenter HA functionality. In short – it’s a second copy of your vCenter VM (and a witness node), with configured replication between active vCenter node and passive vCenter node.
If something happens to the active node, the standby node will take over the entire process and it will reduce the overall downtime of the vCenter Server.
Let’s look at how to enable vCenter HA, and what we need to do.
In the previous article, we talked about how to restore vCenter using native backup. In this part, we will talk about how to restore VMware vCenter Server using Veeam Backup and Replication.
Although restoring a VM using Veeam is a simple task, but when we are talking about vCenter Server a few moments should be considered.
Someone may know that a vSphere 8.0 Update 2 bug prevents you from setting a static MAC address for a VM (KB 95189).
The symptom is simple – you change the MAC address in the VM’s network interface settings, but after you click OK, nothing changes.
As a workaround, there is a solution – do the same using vSphere Host Client (ESXi Web interface). But in my case, this workaround doesn’t help, I’ve received an error:
Failed to reconfigure virtual machine pleasechangemymac. Invalid configuration for device '4'.
If you are in this situation and you need to change a VM MAC address, one good old hack still works – edit the VM’s VMX file.
vCenter server is a critical part of the VMware infrastructure stack, and most components and 3rd-party solutions depend on it. Although downtime of vCenter may not cause a problem with overall infrastructure and will not cause a VMs downtime, it will affect the provision of new resources, management, backups, and so on. So, keeping your vCenter up and running is a priority task in most cases.
In the few articles, we will look at how to backup and restore the vCenter server, if something goes wrong. There are a few strategies for protecting the vCenter server, but all of them depend on the required availability of the service. It can be backup, replication, vCenter HA functionality, or even deploying a new vCenter and connecting hosts manually.
We will look at two options – backup and restore vCenter using the native backup function and backup and restore vCenter using 3rd party backup software.
In this article, we will take a closer look at how to backup vCSA using native backup, available in VAMI.
