How to backup Virtual Center Databases in SQL 2005
Posted by craig 
- on October 6th, 2008 in Tips, Virtualization | 8 Comments »
In order to keep your VMware environment up to date with the latest features and bug fixes, we all are not able to avoid to upgrade our virtual center server from time to time(check Virtual Center 2.5 Update 3). To minimize the impact on the previous data and record, you may want to backup the DB for your virtual center servers. Here is how I backup my DB in SQL 2005 in a very simple way.
Open the management studio in SQL 2005 and connect to the SQL server engine that manage the virtual center and update manager DB. right click and select stop the database engine. Follow by that, open you my computer and browse to the folder which contain the DB and DB log for your databse.
The path of the DB folder could look similiar as D:\SQL2005\MSSQL.2\MSSQL\Data
Look for the DB file which end with .mdf and .ldf.
These is the files you need to backup to restore your DB in the future. Copy those files to a safe location. Once you had done that, you can easily continue your virtual center upgrade as require.
You can copy to a network share drive, backup tape or any storage you need. Backup DB is so simple.
Tags: Database, ESX, SQL, virtual center, virtualcenter, VMware
8 Responses
Sometimes I don’t think I need to backup Virtual Center except license file. Yes probably you may need for audit purpose.
agree with your comment
Dude, usually SQL express 2005 can support ESX host up to what number? what is recommended? bcoz im using express with 7 esx, and now the VC is always hang
I think you need to consider couple of thing here, SQL express is for small scale definately. The data been keep in the DB is related to your virtual center configuration, performance data, update manager DB and etc. If there is too much workload require to be handle by your end, I will suggest you go for the real SQL servers. In term of hang, not much thing you can do from SQL part, but there definitely something you can do on your server and operating system tuning.
Hi, i agree wif u…but i got some info here.
#SQL 2005 Express database size limit is 4GB
#Support up to 5 esx host or 50 VMs
Hi tana, I am not sure the configuration of 5 ESX host and 50 VMs that can be supported by the max 4GB DB size. If I do compare to my current environment, I had definately exceeded the number above, and yet to reach the 4 GB size on my DB yet. Just to share with you on this.
Hey, just to ask – is it better to save the db via backup option or like you do by just copying the files out of it ? Any difference to recover ?
either way will work, depend how you want to do this. Of course, if you use your existing backup software with agent base in place, then you should consider to follow the method to backup the system. Or else, you just copy the DB files and revert back from there.