Until a few months ago I worked with vCenters that were running on a Windows OS. Because that was the common practise. The appliance was promising but not ready for production use. When vSphere 5.5 was introduced it became an interesting discussion,should you use the appliance or still go the windows way.
I think one of the points holding people of from going to the appliance was (and maybe still is) the unknown.
I was mostly familiair with a windows OS.Yes the Windows patching was irritating, and if you wanted to upgrade VMware vCenter ….. that also was annoying. But not anymore… (well I guess for over a year that is…)
The appliance in 6.0 is great. I wrote in another article about my experience of migrating to 6.0 appliance with an update manager deployed. (https://vblog.bartlievers.nl/2017/01/17/update-manager-6-0-with-vcenter-6-0-after-migration-wizard) And I’m loving it. I was impressed by the ease of migrating from vCenter 5.5 running on Windows to 6.0 VCSA.
But there was one, tiny little, issue, called backup and restore.
How should that work when you are running an appliance.
For testing purposes we did a restore of the appliance but ran into a problem. The network adapter changed. The appliance OS didn’t recognize it anymore as eth0 but as eth1.
And our first conclusion was… well…. that is a problem…restoring a VCSA.
Diving into some vmware documentation, I ran into info that restoring a VCSA should work… (see question 29 in https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2146439)…. What did we do wrong….
After examening the events of the restored VCSA we saw an error. vCenter was saying that there was a duplicated MAC address…. so it changed the MAC address of the restored VCSA… hence the eth1.
And yes… that was the issue…. in default vCenter will change a MAC address if it already exists. (that is the short version)…. so I tried it again…. But with a small change.
I created a virtual portgroup on a vswitch, not on the dvswitch. Taking care of the duplicated MAC address in a dvSwitch… I changed the MAC address of the restored VCSA back to the original setting. And I started the VM…. voila….
The VM booted…. and after waiting for the boot process to complete…. I had a restored VCSA, fully functional.
Summary:
- restoring a VCSA does work… just keep in mind if you replace the existing VCSA or restoring it next to it (duplicated MAC address)
- Updating the VCSA is a breeze . You need connection to the internet, and the appliance will take care of the update. No seperate OS updates and vCenter updates.
- (side note) the webclient interface is faster than the one in 5.5
vB(art)log 