Restore VMs from vCenter backup to vCloud director

I’m under the impression that vCloud Director restores require those specific vCenter clients to be created as VM restores would be a direct recovery into the destination vCenter compared through vCloud as a data flow tunnel.

Could you try creating the other vCenter as described in step 9? I’ll look to discuss with our Engineering team as well

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

As the vCloud environment is quite large and changes regularly, that is not really an option. At the moment, there are 47 vCenters behind this vCloud.

I will see what I can do to test this. 

I’m curious on a single vCenter just to confirm functionality… (I don’t have a vCloud Director setup to test 😔) I additionally started a thread with our Engineering team so I’ll definitely keep you posted if I hear anything.

Hi Martijn,

Interesting question, when looking at my lab I have the same vCenter vs. vCloud restore capabilities as you describe. No vCloud Director Pseudoclients, No Organizations to select.

The only option I see is to use the workload domain vCenter which is used by vCloud Director, on which you can select the top level checkbox for the environment as the destination host, following by selecting the vSAN location containing the VM's within the vCloud Organization as the Datastore location. But this does not allow you to define an organization/container relation for the VM. It does however let you select a Resource Pool and VM Folder Path which belongs to the target Organization, both options are shown by organization name.

Never tested so I don't know how vCloud Director will recognize/configure the VM or if additional steps are needed to assign the VM to an Organization. But hope this helps 🙂

That's a great workaround @Siva Kumar Tirupathi 

Will take a look at your solution, that would make things a lot easier 😃

Thanks for replying on thread Siva… Jos and Martijn, please do keep us posted 😁

Had a quick test and by using the vCloud director options on the vCenter config there is a possibility to define Organizations. But I was not able to retrieve the information from vCloud director thru this config, not sure if this has something to do with the load balancer we use. Need more time to check logs and perform additional tests.

Siva Kumar Tirupathi wrote:

 

Hi Martijn,

 

From Command center, we don’t support VMware vm restore to VMware Cloud Director hypervisor. 

 

But to achieve this, we can configure vCloud director host at the vCenter hypervisor configuration level and select this vCenter client as destination hypervisor.

 

 

Thanks

Siva

So, I configure the vCloud director as if it is a vCenter client?
Using the same tenant admin vCloud director credentials?

Thanks!!

Funny what the Dutch guys are doing these days 😉 I just opened a CMR with the request to enrich the existing conversion capability by adding support from/to VCD from the following sources/targets.

VMware -> VCD
AWS -> VCD
Azure -> VCD

VCD -> VMware
VCD -> AWS
VCD - > Azure

My goal is that tenant can do self-service import/export of VMs themselves without the need for the need to perform all kinds of security sensitive workarounds. Only alternative I can think of currently is to do it vCenter→ vCenter and move the VMs after restore towards the tenant folder structure which should trigger an auto import of the VM into the VCD organization.

So if you want this functionality as well then please upvote CMR 359469!!!

@Onno van den Berg  It is a small world ;-)