Last week I upgraded a vCenter 4.0 installation to 4.1u1. The vCenter was installed on a 32-bit VM so I needed to migrate the installation to a new 64-bit host.

I tried to do the migration according to the vSphere 4.1 upgrade pre-installation requirements and considerations guide. But sadly I got an error during the migration process.

RESTORE FILELIST is terminating abnormally.

The error is described in this thread at vmware communities.

Also, the datamigration scripts makes the original vCenter database corrupt. So if the datamigration fails, as it did for me, the original installation is trashed. (Luckily the datamigration scripts exports a backup before trashing it. But this procedure stinks anyway.)

So how did I migrate? Well I found a workaround and did the following.:

On the old vCenter 4.0 server (32-bit)

1. Stop the vCenter service
2. Install Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express
3. Open Management Studio and detached the vCenter database.
4. Copy the database files.
5. Copy the % ProgramData% \ VMware \ VMware VirtualCenter \ SSL folder.
6. Shutdown the vCenter VM.

On the new vCenter 4.1u1 server (64-bit)

1. Install vCenter 4.1u1 with all the default settings. (This installs SQLExpress and the vCenter database)
2. Uninstall vCenter from add and remove programs. (This does not remove the SQLExpress installation)
3. Restore the % ProgramData% \ VMware \ VMware VirtualCenter \ SSL
4. Install Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express
5. Detach the newly installed database and attach the one from the old vCenter server.
6. Create a ODBC connection to the local SQLExpress server with the old vCenter database.
7. Install vCenter 4.1u1 and choose existing ODBC connection during the installation. The installer will detect the old vCenter database and upgrade it.

I wonder why VMware don’t recommend this procedure in the first place?

I found a great way to backup the vCenter SQL database running on SQL Express. The downside of running vCenter on SQL Express is the lack of the SQL agent. So running a scheduled backup of the SQL database is a bit tricky.

ExpressMaint is a small application set of scripts/stored procedures that enables you to run backup and maintenance jobs from commandline.(You could run the application ExpressMaint as well, but I installed the stored procedure version.)

I installed and configured it by doing the following:

1. I created c:\backups to store my backups
2. I downloaded the ExpressMaint TSQL file.
3. I opened a new cmd.exe (with administrative rights) and installed the Stored Procedure by running:
   sqlcmd -S .\SQLEXP_VIM -i c:\expressmaint.sql
4. I created c:\backups\database to store my database backups
5. I created c:\backups\reports to store my reports
6. I created c:\backups\backupscript.sql (SQL file that contains the backup settings, note that my script performs the backup and rebuilds the indexes on the vCenter database):
   exec expressmaint
@database = 'ALL_USER',
@optype = 'DB',
@backupfldr = 'c:\backups\databases',
@reportfldr = 'c:\backups\reports',
@verify = 1,
@dbretainunit = 'days',
@dbretainval = 5,
@rptretainunit = 'weeks',
@rptretainval = 1,
@report = 1
exec expressmaint
@database = 'VIM_VCDB',
@optype = 'REINDEX',
@reportfldr = 'c:\backups\reports',
@rptretainunit = 'days',
@rptretainval = 1,
@report = 1
7. I created c:\backups\PerformBackup.cmd (this is the batch script that executes the backup):
   sqlcmd -S .\SQLEXP_VIM -i c:\backups\backupscript.sql
8. I schedule c:\backups\PerformBackup.cmd using the ordinary Windows scheduled task manager.