Snapshot vCenter Server The Right Way
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- Опубликовано: 6 июл 2024
- Snapshots can help you recover quickly from an issue during a change in a VM. vCenter can benefit from this too! Let's talk about the right way to snapshot your vCenter Server!
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Really appreciate this vid. To the point, and good explanations. Thanks!
Best overview I have seen. Thank you for posting.
Thank you. This helped a lot.
Great video, thank you for the information.
I took a snapshot while vcsa is on, that's the reason why I am here. ^ ^ Now I have wait about 15mins for no response.
Great video
Glad you enjoyed it!
Instead of shutting down the vCenter Appliance from the ESXi host it resides on, the best way is to go VAMI and shut it down from there. You can bring it back up from the ESXi host.
That's one of the things I love about Technology - there are always multiple ways to get the job done!
Yeah, but I liked his hint: By logging into the ESXi Host, you already have checked the accessibility of this host and you will be spared a deadly surprise in the case of, you know?
What if you have a lot of virtual machines? Aren't you only allowed like 15 snapshots? If you have more of an enterprise, rather than a small office, how would you be able to back up all the Data centers and hosts then?
Those are good questions! In this video, we are taking a snapshot of the vCenter Server Appliance as a precaution before we upgrade it or perform some other type of maintenance that we would like to have a quick rollback option for. It will only be offline for short while and won't affect any running virtual machines.
There is no vCenter-wide limit on snapshots. There are two main considerations to keep in mind:
First - you have to have enough disk space for the delta files that will be created.
Second - Each VM can only have up to 32 simultaneous snapshots (nested in what is called a chain).
VMware publishes some best practices around snapshots in a KB article - kb.vmware.com/s/article/1025279.
Some guidelines I follow when taking snapshots
* Snapshots are not backups
* I keep snapshots for only as long as needed
* I do not snapshot Windows Domain Controllers. These have their own replication and I could not snapshot a DC without some risk of causing problems in Active Directory
* Any server with a database (like vCenter) is shutdown before I take the snapshot
Thanks for watching the video! I hope this helps!
@@cybersylum OH, I see. So if I wanted to do an upgrade of Vcenter from 6.5 to 7.0, then I should do a full backup. Is there also an article for that?
Thank you for responding!
If you need to do a minor upgrade - say 7.0 to 7.0 U2, the upgrade will be done in-place and you should take snapshot before you atttempt the upgrade. I have made a video covering that - ruclips.net/video/zTBJ8fYJfKs/видео.html
If you are doing a major upgrade (6.5 to 7.x) the process will actually create a new vCenter Server Appliance and migrate the data from old to new. You don't need to backup vCenter for that as the original will remain unchanged. Check out a video from VMware TAM Lab on this process - ruclips.net/video/zTBJ8fYJfKs/видео.html
You can (and should) backup your vCenter. The VMware process allows you to backup the config to a file which can be used to re-install vCenter from your last config. Check out ruclips.net/video/j43Q8dqOdrE/видео.html
@@cybersylum I will add, if dealing with multiple vcenter appliances that are linked (Embedded Link Mode) you need to power down ALL appliances and take a snapshot of ALL linked vcenters, if you have to rollback for any reason, ALL linked vcenters need to be rolled back as well, this is why I hate ELM for vcenter, it makes DR a little more difficult imo if you have multiple data centers in different parts of the globe.
@@SCDeerAddict Appreciate the comment - You are absolutely right! Another consideration is for anyone still running external PSCs on older versions of vCenter - those need be powered down and snapshotted at the same time as well.