@olivierlambert said in VM's from ESXi, live migration not possible:

@glatour Where would you add this in our doc? (the shrink tip)

There: https://docs.xcp-ng.org/guides/shrink_virtual_drive/ under the Windows VMs part.

@olivierlambert said in VM's from ESXi, live migration not possible:

Done: https://docs.xcp-ng.org/troubleshooting/windows-pv-tools/#not-all-pv-drivers-are-correctly-installed

wow that was fast, thank you!

@olivierlambert said in VM's from ESXi, live migration not possible:

Oh wow, I couldn't think it would have been helpful that fast!! I think I might update our documentation page about Windows tools and this issue.

Yes, take a look at ticket #7723929. There is also something about shrinking a Windows partition using Linux tools and avoid data loss that could be added to the doc.

@OhSoNoob said in VM's from ESXi, live migration not possible:

@olivierlambert The problem with fully installing the tools is our antivirus solution SentinelOne. Simply pausing the agent + reboot gave the XenTools the possibility to install succesfully. After a succesfull installation, enabling the SentinelOne agent again is possible without any other issues regarding the tools or drivers.

Thank you for that find, I was in the same boat.

@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 backups

Thank you.

@olivierlambert

I need to plan for the worst, how can I restore a VM with metedata and a VHD file? Is it possible?

@glatour

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.

@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!

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.