Recovery from a total failure

[turbo427]

I am evaluating vSphere 6 and in testing backup I can't figure out how you would restore to VMDK that VDP made when I no longer have vsphere client or or vSphere data protection running. Let me explain let say I have 10 vm running on 3 hosts all the VM or have the same NFS storage they are running from, including the vsphere and the VDP vm. Now let say we have a complete failure of that NFS host now all my VM are down but I did have VDP making backups on another NSF server. How do I get everything backup and running.

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - you would have to have that other NFS datastore presented to the environment than would be able to restore the VMs -

[turbo427]

So the NFS that the VDP is creating backup on would restore if I lost everything else. Would I have to restore vCenter and VDP to new host to get to those backups.

[weinstein5]

yes - this gives a nice overview - http://www.vladan.fr/vsphere-data-protection-vdp-restore-operations/

[turbo427]

Ok we just accidentally missed  up or NFS share by testing Gluster NFS on the same server. So now all my guest vm including VCenter and vSphere Data Protection do not work. We turned NFS back on files are still there but log into Hypervisor from vShere Client (root log in) won't see the drive says inactive. Tried refresh even tried to unmount. Gave the following error stack So how would I go about restoring this.

Call "HostDatastoreSystem.RemoveDatastore" for object "ha-datastoresystem" on ESXi "mystique" failed.

Cannot remove datastore 'Colossus' because One or more virtual machines are still registered on it. Correct the problem and retry the operation.

Thanks for hanging with me!!!

[turbo427]

Fixed the broken NFS rebooting the vsphere hyper-visor made it find and reconnect to the NFS. Still wonder how I would have restored with out vCenter server or vSphere Data Protection.

[RyanJMN]

I recommend using a VDP replication job to create a copy of your data on a 2nd VDP appliance running on different storage than production.  If VDP goes down you have the 2nd copy to restore from.  If vCenter goes down you can do an emergency restore from either appliance.