Category: vCenter [en]

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vCenter Appliance Migration Upgrade

Relink VM MoRef IDs to Veeam Backup Restore-Points

In this post I will show how to use Veeam Migration Utility in cases when you have to migrate a whole cluster to a new vCenter, but you can’t afford to cut existing backup chains.

The Good

Upgrading a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) has become a commodity in recent times. All you have to do is to run an upgrade wizard and point to the old VCSA. Thanks to VMware developers it’s one of these “Next-Next-Finish” deployments. At the end you’ll have an upgraded vCenter with same settings, name, IP, and (if you like) historic data.  This is great! I can remember vCenter on Windows upgrades that were a PITA.

The Bad

In some rare (but ugly) occasions you simply can’t use the wizard and you have to migrate your hosts to a completely new VCSA without data migration. You’ll have to rebuild every setting, datacenter, cluster, folder, pool, group, rule, etc from scratch to match your old environment. Continue reading “vCenter Appliance Migration Upgrade”

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Backup and Restore of ESXi host configurations with PowerCLI

I’m a big fan of PowerCLI one-liners. 🙂

Before performing updates, upgrades or any other maintenance on ESXi hosts, you should backup your ESXi host configuration. Setting up a new ESXi host as replacement is a no-brainer, but rebuilding a lost configuration can be a PITA and might take hours.

In the old times it was necesary to open a SSH shell connection or to use vSphereCLI to issue backup commands to ESXi hosts. Recently I realized that there is a very handy PowerShell commandlet to backup and restore the configuration. Continue reading “Backup and Restore of ESXi host configurations with PowerCLI”

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VCSA and SCP

Using WinSCP with vCenter Server Appliance

Sometimes it’s necesary to exchange files with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). Secure Copy Protocol is the tool of choice to do that job. Besides CLI commands there are handy programs like WinSCP.

While trying to establish a WinSCP connection to VCSA I’ve received communication errors. Whereas SSH connection worked without problems.

The problem is that WinSCP cannot use VCSA’s default shell as communication target. You have to switch default shell first before connecting. To do so, login to VCSA with SSH and activate Bash. Continue reading “VCSA and SCP”