Virtual VCS Questions

[Justin Ferello]

Hello all,

I have been playing with the VMWare VCS inage that we purchased.  I currently have it running on my primary production ESXi server and it runs fine.  I am preparing/testing for disaster recovery.  So I created an OVF of my virtual VCS, however when I restore the OVF to my secondary ESXi server the VCS changes S/Ns and all the keys are then invalid.  Am I missing something?

Thanks,

Justin

[gubadman · Accepted solution]

Hi Justin,

That is as intended. To stop people buying one and then cloinging it to be many for free.

Thanks,

Guy

[Justin Ferello]

Guy,

Understood, but how does one backup/restore the virtual VCS then?  Would we use the RMA license transfer tool to move the licenses to the new S/N of the restored VM?

Thanks,

Justin

[awinter2]

Justin,

as far as I know, you could backup the virtual VCS's datastore files (.vmdk and so forth) and restore using these files. If restoring to the same host/cluster you should be able to preserve the UUID and avoid a change in the VCS serial number.

How are you backing up and restoring other guest VM's in your environment? Can you describe how you created the OVF file previously mentioned?

- Andreas

[Justin Ferello]

Andreas,

For your first answer, so I would need to create a cluster of ESXi servers then, so I can restore the datastore files to the second ESXi server in case the first one fails.

Second, I used the VMWare standalone convertor app to create the OVF.

Thanks,

Justin

[awinter2]

Hi Justin,

it might be the case that you will be able to preserve the UUID also when restoring to a host in a different cluster or to a different, stand-alone host, but I can't confirm or deny this as I haven't tried.

I know at least that moving a VM VCS from one host to another using vMotion works just fine and will not affect the UUID and consequently the serial number, which leads me to think that the same behaviour would apply when restoring a VM from a datastore/vmdk backup.

-Andreas

[Justin Ferello]

All,

Still looking for some guidance on this.  I can see a big problem with this.  I have been unable to restore my test VM image with the same S/N to even the same VMWare host.

The problem I see here is that a customer buys one server, installs VSphere v5, then downloads and installs the VCS OVA file.  They then purchase licenses etc. for said S/N.  Now, they can take a snapshot that will save them from bad config changes and corrupt OS issue.  However, what happens if this server crashes?

The only method I can see right now is that the customer would create a new VSphere v5 server, create a new VM from the default OVA file.  Then go to the license rehost tool and transfer the licenses from their old S/N to the new one, correct?

Thanks,

Justin