The VMware Cloud Foundation Instance Recovery Guide provides guidance on recovering a VMware Cloud Foundation system by performing a complete reconstruction from a backup.

This document provides detailed instructions on recovering an entire VMware Cloud Foundation system, including the management domain and VI workload domains, where you must recover all components.

Example Failure Scenarios

The cases when you must recover all components in a VMware Cloud Foundation instance might be one of the following:

  • Complete site failure

  • Recovery from a malware or ransomware attack

  • Catastrophic logical corruption

Intended Audience

VMware Cloud Foundation Instance Recovery Guide is intended for cloud architects, cloud administrators, and cloud operators who are familiar with and want to recover a VMware Cloud Foundation system that has experienced a significant failure.

Related VMware Cloud Foundation Documentation

In addition to this documentation, the following publications for the VMware Cloud Foundation version in your environment must be available during the recovery process:

  • VMware Cloud Foundation Deployment Guide

  • VMware Cloud Foundation Administration Guide

You can open these documents from the VMware Cloud Foundation Documentation main page.

Supported Topologies

You can follow VMware Cloud Foundation Instance Recovery Guide to recover specific VMware Cloud Foundation topologies.

Several topologies of VMware Cloud Foundation exist according to the number of availability zones and VMware Cloud Foundation instances. See VMware Cloud Foundation Design Guide.

The following topologies are supported for recovery using this guidance.

Supported Topology

Description

Single Instance - Single Availability Zone

Workload domains are deployed in a single availability zone.

Supported VMware Cloud Foundation Versions

You can use VMware Cloud Foundation Instance Recovery Guide with following versions of VMware Cloud Foundation.

  • VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4.1
  • VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5.x
  • VMware Cloud Foundation 5.0.x
  • VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.x

VMware Cloud Foundation Components to Back Up

All important data in a VMware Cloud Foundation system should be backed up to a remote backup site. This includes all VMs in the management domain and VMs in workload domains that require data protection.

After initial bring-up, the management domain contains a core set of VMs to manage the VMware Cloud Foundation system. When you deploy add-on components from the SDDC Manager Dashboard, for example, VMware Aria Automation, VMware Cloud Foundation deploys additional management VMs for those components. Finally, when you deploy a workload domain, VMware Cloud Foundation deploys additional VMs to manage the workload domain.

Note:

You may have other VMs deployed in the management domain that require backup. For example, Microsoft SQL servers, Microsoft Active Directory servers, backup software VMs, and so on. Identify which of these VMs exist and plan to back them up.

This guide does not provide information about backing up VMs in workload domains, but your backup plan should also identify and back up critical VMs in workload domains.

Backup Guidance

To enable a successful recovery of a VMware Cloud Foundation system, you must have a defined backup strategy.

The processes in this document use the following backup types. For configuring backups, see the guidance in the VMware Cloud Foundation Administration Guide.

Table 1. VMware Cloud Foundation Components and Backup Type
VMware Cloud Foundation Component Backup Type
vCenter Server instances File
SDDC Manager

File
NSX Manager nodes

File

Documenting the System Configuration of VMware Cloud Foundation

Keeping detailed as-built documentation on the system configuration eases the recovery process if a failure in your VMware Cloud Foundation system occurs.

While the processes in this document retrieve much of the information below, keep a record of the following items. Save this information on a secure secondary storage.

  • Topology diagrams of the VMware Cloud Foundation system
    • Physical networking
    • vSphere distributed switch networking
    • NSX networking
    • Workload domain configuration
    • Cluster configuration for each cluster in a workload domain
    • ESXi hosts assigned to each cluster
  • Networking information
    • ESXi host vmnic-to-switch port mappings
    • VM virtual NIC to distirbuted port group mappings
    • IP address information of the VMkernel interfaces on the ESXi hosts
    • IP address information of VMs
    • DNS, NTP, AD, and other well-known servers used by the VMware Cloud Foundation system

PowerShell Automation for This Guidance

You can perform the procedures in this guide manually or by running cmdlets in an associated PowerShell module.

The PowerShell cmdlets are available in an open-source module as code-based alternatives to completing certain procedures in each SDDC component's user interface. For more information on the PowerShell cmdlets for recovery of VMware Cloud Foundation, see the VMware.CloudFoundation.InstanceRecovery open-source project in GitHub.

Table 2. Prerequisites for CLI Implementation of VMware Cloud Foundation Recovery

Prerequisite

  • Microsoft Windows 2019

  • Microsoft PowerShell 7.x

  • VMware OVFTool

  • OpenSSL lite version 1.0.2g or higher installed and added to the Windows PATH system variable.

  • Install the supporting modules from the PowerShell Gallery by running the following commands:

    Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -MinimumVersion 13.2.0 -Scope AllUsers -Force
Install-Module -Name VMware.Sdk.Vcf.CloudBuilder -MinimumVersion 5.1.0 -Scope AllUsers -Force
Install-Module -Name VMware.Sdk.Vcf.SddcManager -MinimumVersion 5.1.0 -Scope AllUsers -Force
Install-Module -Name Posh-SSH -MinimumVersion 3.0.8 -Scope AllUsers -Force
Install-Module -Name 7Zip4PowerShell -MinimumVersion 2.4.0 -Scope AllUsers -Force
Install-Module -Name VMware.CloudFoundation.InstanceRecovery -RequiredVersion 1.0.10 -Scope AllUsers -Force

  • Open a new PowerShell console and run the following command to confirm all the prerequisites are installed.

    Confirm-VCFInstanceRecoveryPreReqs