restoring META

churchers

If you have a backup of a pool META you can click the server and then restore.
What happens if you had to rebuild the server?

the UUID of the server will not be the same, how do you get the pool data from that pool back to that server?

olivierlambert

Restoring whole metadata will replace and erase everything from your current host database. That's the point: being able to entirely replace XAPI database with your saved metadata.

churchers

@olivierlambert i get that but when i try (justed tried in testlab) it says it can't find the pool.
this / host, this i sbecause a new UUID has been created. how to you restore an existing pool to a new host pool (to overwrite it)

olivierlambert

Can you give the exact error message you have? (eg from Settings/logs). I'm not very familiar myself with metadata restore because I never used it myself for my own needs

Forza

I was also wondering about the usefulness of Metadata backups vs normal vm+XO config backups. I guess you could have a pool malfunction that kills your ip and sr settings. But if you have your infrastructure documented it is probably easier to restore VMs and XOA config from backups?

churchers

it seems to be a missing option that XOA should have.
Just to restate and explain. (i'll use small UUIDs)

You have ONE host pool (silly start) UUID=1 backed up pool META.
Disaster, fire and the host has gone.

You build a new server, this server has a UUID=2. now when you get XOA back up and running and join this new server, the restore will NOT allow you to restore the backup to this host as it's looking to restore to UUID=1

All is not lost because if you go digging in the XOA datastore location you can find the backups.

you will find a meta.json and a data file. the data file is the pool backup that you can copy onto the host and use the XE restore command to restore it.

If you have more than one POOL in your XOA, these files can be read to identify the pool. (name, UUID, known IP address etc...)

Shame XOA doesn't ask the next question of restore to same pool or overwrite another.

does that make sense?

churchers

@s-pam i'd say use them, always use the. Only a few KB of space and could be every handy. We have 3 servers in the pool so overlooked requirement for full pool recovery. (p.s we didn't fail, it's during DR testing it was flagged)

we had the backups on already and if this had been a real issue, would have saved a lot of bacon!!

turn it on ! (and check you can get it without a running XOA for quicker restore in full meltdown.)