DR worst case planning

Dude417

Hi all,
I'm in process of migrating VM's over to XCP-NG....all is going well on that front.

I'm also building a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan.
Part of that plan is dealing with "worst case" scenarios.

XCP's backups and disaster recovery seem very robust, and have worked fine under most normal conditions.

But I've run into a scenario that I can't find an answer to.

If I lost my XCPNG hypervisor.... completely, 100%. It is completely unrecoverable.

I am forced to setup a new XCP hypervisor, and during the setup I connect to an existing NFS SR.
(where my disaster recovery files are stored).

I can see the files under "orphan VDI's"
The disaster recovery files are stored in VHD format.
How can I pull these VHD files back to the Hypervisor, and boot them up ?

I can't find a clear path to do this ?

-S

Dude417

@olivierlambert
SMH .... Ok ...just found the import config under settings >XO Config... sheesh.... how did I miss that.

'Do an XO metadata backup to your backup repository. In case of losing XO, add a new backup repo which is the previous one, and XO will find both all XO metadata ready to restore and previous backup"

I wasn't doing the metadata backup to the SR.... I'll have to step back and try that again.
Thank you for your time !

olivierlambert

Hi!

If you just lost the host and not the SR, you can simply restore the pool metadata. It will reconnect to all your storage and such
If you lost both host and data, you can simply restore all your VMs via Xen Orchestra.

Dude417

@olivierlambert

Ahhh..... so under by backups I need to make sure that the pools metadata is backed up. Probably at the same time as the actual DR files for the VM's. That makes sense now.

So after a new host is setup, and a clean XO setup.... how / where do I restore the metadata ??
the docs' seems to assume that I have access to it.... when a clean XO install will probably not ?
ie: A new XO instance will not show any historical backups of the metadata to restore ... yes ?

The obvious answerer is "restore your XO config" then you can see the metadata backups...
which puts me in the same situation.... how do I restore the XO config on a new clean install???

@olivierlambert said in DR worst case planning:

you can simply restore all your VMs via Xen Orchestra.
--- assuming that Xen Orchestra wasn't on that same host. Correct ?

olivierlambert

So, 2 options:

Use XOA metadata cloud backup, were your XO data are stored in your xen-orchestra.com account. Easiest solution to get back with everything setup.
Do an XO metadata backup to your backup repository. In case of losing XO, add a new backup repo which is the previous one, and XO will find both all XO metadata ready to restore and previous backup
Worst case: you lost everything except your backup repo. Just install XCP-ng and re-deploy XOA, go into Settings/remote (BR) and reconnect to your backup repository, you'll be able to restore all VMs from scratch

edit: no need to have XOA on the host, it can be anywhere

Dude417

@olivierlambert
SMH .... Ok ...just found the import config under settings >XO Config... sheesh.... how did I miss that.

'Do an XO metadata backup to your backup repository. In case of losing XO, add a new backup repo which is the previous one, and XO will find both all XO metadata ready to restore and previous backup"

I wasn't doing the metadata backup to the SR.... I'll have to step back and try that again.
Thank you for your time !

olivierlambert

You are welcome