AOMEI Cyber Backup
How to Change vCenter IP Address Settings Securely
Do you want to change the IP address of vCenter? Many users reported that the ESXi host is in a disconnected state after changes. Today, let's take a look at how to change vCenter IP address securely.
By Crystal / Updated on March 2, 2023
Case: I Want to Change vCenter IP Address
I need to change the IP address of our vCenter server as its moving to a different subnet. Has anyone had experience doing this? I assume ones the network details are changed all ESXi/VMs should reconnect to vCenter because it uses DNS and IP. Is this possible?
- Question from VMware Community
After deploying the vCenter Server Appliance, you can edit the DNS settings and select which DNS server to use. You can edit the IP address settings of the vCenter Server Appliance. Since the release of vSphere 6.5, changing vCenter IP address is official supported. So it’s possible to change the IP address and DNS settings of the vCenter Server Appliance.
✍ Note: Changing vCenter IP Address is not without any risk, please perform a backup of your vCenter VM before making some changes.
Prerequisites
- To change the IP address of the appliance, verify that the system name of the appliance is an FQDN. If, during the deployment of the appliance, you set an IP address as a system name, you cannot change the IP address after the deployment. The system name is always used as a primary network identifier.
- Verify that the user who logs in to the vCenter Server instance in the vCenter Server Appliance is a member of the SystemConfiguration.Administrators group in vCenter Single Sign-On.
✍ Note: In vCenter Server 6.7, using dual IP stacks (IPv4 and IPv6) is not supported.
How to Change vCenter IP Address Step by Step
There are a few ways to change the IP Address of the ESXi host, most common is to use the console provided by your vendor ( IPMI,ILO,Draq )
Change the IP Address of the vCenter with the vSphere Web Client
1. Enter the url “https://FQDN:5480/” and log in with your root account.
2. On the vSphere Web Client main page, access to Networking >> Manage tab.
3. Change the IP Settings and save the settings by OK tab.
4. Reboot your vCenter Server and check if you could access to the vCenter with the new IP address. If you can access the vCenter just try to login and check the inventory objects.
After changing the vCenter server IP Address, I noticed that the ESXi host reports a message with a status of disconnected to the vCenter server. Because the heartbeat packets are being send to the old vCenter IP address, we must change the property “ServerIp” on every ESXi host.
1. You should connect to the ESXi host with SSH.
2. Edit the vpxa.cfg file located in the /etc/vmware/vpxa location otherwise remove the ESXi Hosts from the inventory and re-adding is required
3. Edit the vpxa.cfg file with a text editor, I used vi editor which is very common one.
4. Find the “IP_ADDRESS” field and change to the new IP address.
5. Check the changes.
6. Then go to restart the hostd and vpxa services.
7. Enter the below commands to restart the services
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart
Once, these services are restarted, the host will automatically connect to the vCenter server again.
Before changing the IP address of vCenter, always remember to back up the ESXi virtual machine to avoid data loss.
Backup Solution to Prevent Virtual Machine Crashes
vCenter Server is a very convenient official platform for centrally managing ESXi virtual environments and large numbers of VMs on it. A single vCenter Server instance can support a maximum of 1,000 hosts, 10,000 powered-on virtual machines and 15,000 registered virtual machines.
However, vCenter Server does not provide the feature of virtual machine backup. And that makes backup software a commonly accepted choice. A professional backup tool is more efficient than the built-in features.
Here I introduce you to a VMware backup software -- AOMEI Cyber Backup. It automates the backup process of multiple VMs managed by vCenter Server, and sends email notifications if there's an error.
✦ Agentless Backup: create complete and independent image-level backup for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V VMs.
✦ Flexible vSphere Backup: batch backup large numbers of VMs managed by vCenter Server, or multiple VMs on a standalone ESXi host.
✦ Multiple Storage Destinations: backup to local drive, or network destinations like Windows share or NAS.
✦ Automated Execution: create backup schedules to automate backups daily, weekly, monthly.
✦ Role Assignment: allows one administrator to create sub-accounts with limited privileges.
✦ Email notification: Send email notification when the task is completed or abnormal.
AOMEI Cyber Backup supports VMware ESXi 6.0 and later versions. You can click the following button to download the 30-day free trial.
*You can choose to install this VM backup software on either Windows or Linux system
▶ Schedule Backup for vCenter Virtual Machines from Central Console
First, you should bind your vCenter device and click Create Backup Task to schedule your backup plan.
AOMEI Cyber Backup Trial offers flexible backup strategies which performs full, differential, or incremental backup, and automate execution according to the frequency you specified. Meanwhile, Backup Cleanup helps to automatically delete the old backup copies that exceed the retention period you specified.
Created backup tasks will be listed and monitored separately for restoring, progress checking and schedule changing.
Summary
Some users had problems changing the IP address of later versions of vCenter Server, this article walks you through successfully changing the IP address of the vCenter Server appliance as well as providing help when VMware vCenter Server IP address changes cause your VMware ESXi host to disconnect.
