How to restore a VM from VHD files?
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Hi,
This is my first post; I am migrating away from the VMware world to XCP-ng and XOA. My setup consisted of 12 ESXi hosts, 2 NFS VM stores (TrueNAS + SSD) and 2 NFS backup stores (TrueNAS + HDD) running about 150 VMs. My VMs where backed up to a NAS using Veeam and I was using TrueNAS integrated ZFS sync to replicate VMs to another NAS. That way, if I had a problem recovering a VM with Veeam, I always had the replicated VM data that I could copy over, I just had to register the VM and start it. This setup was simple and rock solid for years.
I am trialing XCP-ng and XOA and I am trying to break and fix things. It seems like it’s not all VMs data that sits on the NFS shares, only the VHD disks with changing UUIDs. The VM configuration is somewhere else, on the hosts or on the XOA?
I am using the integrated backup tool which is nice. My question is : how could I backup my VMs in another way to easily restore a VM if the XOA (and the backup tool) and the VMs metadata are unavailable?
Any suggestion would be appreciated!
Thank you.
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@glatour said in How to restore a VM from VHD files?:
It seems like it’s not all VMs data that sits on the NFS shares, only the VHD disks with changing UUIDs. The VM configuration is somewhere else, on the hosts or on the XOA?
Correct, the metadata is stored inside your XCP-ng pool. You can back it up using XOA. See the documentation for full details.
how could I backup my VMs in another way to easily restore a VM if the XOA (and the backup tool) and the VMs metadata are unavailable?
With XOA, you could simply deploy another instance, point it to your prior backups, and then restore any needed VMs.
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@Danp said in How to restore a VM from VHD files?:
@glatour said in How to restore a VM from VHD files?:
It seems like it’s not all VMs data that sits on the NFS shares, only the VHD disks with changing UUIDs. The VM configuration is somewhere else, on the hosts or on the XOA?
Correct, the metadata is stored inside your XCP-ng pool. You can back it up using XOA. See the documentation for full details.
how could I backup my VMs in another way to easily restore a VM if the XOA (and the backup tool) and the VMs metadata are unavailable?
With XOA, you could simply deploy another instance, point it to your prior backups, and then restore any needed VMs.
What happens if your XOA restore does not work or if your backups are corrupted? Is there any other way to do backups?
How can you recover the VM metadata ir order to restore from a VHD file?
Thanks!
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I think I found a part of the answer, I was using only delta backups. I configured full backups and now I have .xva files that I can import. That will do, I just need to use ZFS sync to replicate those backups.
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However, it will only do full backup (XVAs are only fulls). But you can't think it's better than the incremental backup: the XVA can be corrupted on the backup storage. Also "X restore doesn't work" isn't a risk, because… there's an entire team behind it to make sure it will work. Even losing your XO won't affect your backups.
If you fear about backup integrity, then use mirror backup or backup to multiple location, it's the best bet
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I need to plan for the worst, how can I restore a VM with metedata and a VHD file? Is it possible?
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Just use XO for it. I'm not sure to understand in which universe you won't be able to do that
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@olivierlambert said in How to restore a VM from VHD files?:
Just use XO for it. I'm not sure to understand in which universe you won't be able to do that
I am asking because about 5 years ago the chain of incremental Veeam backups broke for about 40 VMs and the only thing that saved me was the ZFS replication of the VMs folders/data. After that event, I just like to plan for the worst...
OK so to resume, if I loose all my VMs, my XCP-ng hosts, my pools and the XOA, I can still recover if I have backups on my remotes by:
1- Spin up an XOA on a fresh XCP-ng
2- Restore the XO config from backups
3- Restore VMs from backupsThank you.
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That's 100% correct. Everything is self contained in the backup storage, and fresh XO on any fresh XCP-ng host will be able to restore all your backups.
Regarding an incremental chain, you can add the option to create a full every XX incremental run, to reduce the risk of a corrupted element in a very long chain of delta.
