Restoring a vCenter (4036790)

The vCenter server crashed and needs to restored through vRanger.

1. You will have to use vSphere Client and go into the host that you are planning to restore the vCenter server to and disassociate the host from the VC. To do this, in vSphere you will need to select the option under the Summary Tab to 'Disassociate host from vCenter Server.' The host has to be removed from the VC due to the fact that the host will look for the VC to perform some of the functions during the restore, and since it is offline the job will error out.

2. After doing so go back into vRanger and we'll need to remove the VC from inventory. Before we remove it make sure the host that you want to restore the VC to in the vRanger inventory (if it's not listed you will need to add it), and make share the yellow key icon is displayed on the host itself which validates that you have the root credential assigned to it. If you don't see the little yellow key on the host itself (not to be confused with the larger yellow key icon which represents your license) right click on the host in question and click Credential Properties and type in "root" for the username and the given password for the root account, if this is correct you should now see a little yellow key icon the host  and right click on the VC and click Remove VirtualCenter.' This will remove the VC from the vRanger inventory.

3. Once the VC is removed and the inventory refreshes you can click into My Repositories and choose the savepoint for the VC that you want to restore. The wizard will walk you through choosing a host and datastore that you wish to restore it to.

*** Once Restored ***

Now that the VC has been restored you might find that your hosts are not authenticated to your VC properly due to the fact that you dis-joined the one in order to restore the VC itself. In this case, since the VC itself sits on the one that you had disjoined you might find it easiest to perform the same disassociate/re-associate method upon the other hosts if the VC itself shows them as disjoined. This way you won't have to deal with the migration of the VC off to another host in order to get the others joined back into the VC.

You will need to go back into vRanger and you will need to add the VC back into the vRanger inventory.