This little host backup utility I created back in February 2012 has been receiving quite a bit of attention, and has already managed to get over 2000 downloads.
Someone recently asked the other day if it was possible to restore a configuration file to a new host (i.e. new hardware). With version 1.0 of my utility, this was not possible due to mismatches that the PowerCLI cmdlet finds (i.e. MAC addresses on NICs etc… on the new hardware when compared to the existing backup). However, the Set-VMHostFirmware cmdlet allows the use of a -Force paramter, so I set about updating the utility to allow for this.
Here is a quick list of changes in version 1.1
- Allows restore to new hardware (tick the “Force restore to new hardware” checkbox). Please note that I have only very briefly tested this on virtualised ESXi hosts – it works, but I am not sure how networking configurations are applied to NICs and differing physical NIC orders – so it is best to test this thoroughly in a dev/test environment before using anywhere else!
- Tested against single ESXi hosts as opposed to connecting to vCenter first.
- Updated labels to neaten up a bit – connection box now shows that you can connect to single hosts or vCenter
- Tested on ESXi 5.1
You can download version 1.1 from the same page as before: ESXi 5 Host Backup & Restore GUI Utility