Backing up Fault Tolerance virtual machines

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to back up Fault Tolerance (FT) virtual machines.

 

Note: As taking snapshots of FT virtual machines is not supported, VMware Consolidated Backup is also not supported for FT virtual machines.

Environment

VMware Consolidated Backup 1.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware vCenter Server 6.7.x

Resolution

VMware FT does not support virtual machine snapshots in vSphere 4.x and 5.x. However, to protect against storage failure or data corruption, you can back up FT virtual machine using templates and using storage snapshots.

Backing up FT virtual machines using templates

To set up the virtual machine:

1. Before turning on FT for the virtual machine, clone a template of the virtual machine. For more information, see Working with Templates and Clones section in the vSphere Basic Administration Guide.
2. Turn on FT for the virtual machine. For more information, see Turning on Fault Tolerance for Virtual Machines section in the vSphere Availability Guide.
3. Turn on your in-guest backup application for the FT virtual machine. For more information, consult your vendor documentation.

For vSphere 6.5 & 6.7: Disk-only snapshots created for vStorage APIs - Data Protection (VADP) backups are supported with Fault Tolerance. However, legacy FT does not support VADP


On recovery:

1. Deploy the template that you created in step 1 of the previous section to a virtual machine. For more information, see Working with Templates and Clones section in the vSphere Basic Administration Guide.
2. Use your in-guest backup application to recover the data to this new virtual machine. For more information, consult your vendor documentation.
3. Turn on FT for the virtual machine. For more information, see Turning on Fault Tolerance for Virtual Machines section in the vSphere Availability Guide.
4. Turn on your in-guest backup application for the FT virtual machine. For more information, consult your vendor documentation.

For updates to guest operating systems or applications that can tolerate FT being temporarily turned off:

1. Update the guest operating system or applications in the virtual machine.
2. Turn off FT. For more information, see Disabling or turning Off VMware FT (1008026).
3. Perform steps 1-3 in To set up the virtual machine.

For updates to guest operating systems or applications that cannot tolerate FT being turned off:

1. Update the guest operating system or applications in the virtual machine.
2. Deploy the template that you created in To set up the virtual machine section (let this be VM2). For more information, see Working with Templates and Clones section in the vSphere Basic Administration Guide.
3. Update the guest operating system or applications in VM2.
4. Convert VM2 back to template. For more information, see Working with Templates and Clones section in the vSphere Basic Administration Guide.

Note: There is a possibility that the resulting virtual machine and template will not be in sync if you use different update steps. This means that the template will not be a true clone of the virtual machine.

Backing up FT virtual machines using storage snapshots

To back up a FT virtual machine using storage snapshots:

 

Note: Storage snapshotting is a feature provided by the backend storage array and is different than VMware ESX snapshots.

1. Using storage snapshotting, snapshot the virtual machine files. For more information, consult your storage vendor documentation.
2. Register the new virtual machine .vmx file to another ESX host, but do not turn on FT for this virtual machine.
3. Use VMware Consolidated Backup to back up the newly registered non-FT virtual machine. For more information, see the Virtual Machine Backup Guide.

Additional Information

For more information on configuring Fault Tolerance, see the vSphere Availability Guide.

For more information on vSphere Features Not Supported with Fault Tolerance, see the Fault Tolerance Interoperability section of the vSphere availability Guide.

For more information on What's New with vSphere 6.0 regarding Fault Tolerance, see the What's New in the VMware vSphere 6.0 Platform Technical Whitepaper.

Disabling or turning Off VMware FT
Turn on Fault Tolerance option is disabled