Question

Backup of the vCenter and a Host in VMWare

Answer 1

Backup of a Host

The usual thing is to backup all the Virtual Machines but normally it is usually left aside both the vCenter and the configurations of the Hosts. It is a quick and easy task to make a backup of our Hosts using PowerCLI.

The steps to follow are those:

• Connect to a Host or vCenter Server
• Execute command to export the configuration of a Host

In this case we will connect to our vCenter server and, in this way, with a single authentication we will have access to all the Hosts that are added to the vCenter service.

The command is as follows:

Connect-viserver <name or ip vCenter> -user <vCenter user> -password <password>

The command to back up a Host is the following:
Get-VMHostFirmware -VMHost <host name or ip> -BackupConfiguration -DestinationPath <destination folder for the copy>

With these simple steps we will have an IMPORTANT backup of our HOST.

Backup of the vCenter

The normal thing in a CPD in production is to back up all the Virtual Machines. Also, if the vCenter server is also virtualized, we will implicitly have a backup copy of the server.

It is a very common practice to have the virtual environment backup software installed on the same vCenter server.

For security reasons as well as to face an update or migration process with ease, we are interested in knowing how to manually backup a vCenter server .

In this case, we will see how to back up a vCenter 5.x server with an embedded database (SQL Express Instance that the VMware installer deploys by default).

The vCenter server backup consists of three elements:

• Digital certificates
• Configuration files * .cfg
• VCenter Server database

The first thing we should do is stop the vCenter service. To do this we open the local services console and stop the service "VMware VirtualCenter Server".

The digital certificate and configuration files are in different folders according to the Windows version, in my case this is a Windows 2008 Server:

Windows Server 2008 R2:% program files% VMwareVMware VirtualCenter

To make a backup of the Database of an instance of SQL Express it is necessary to have installed the SQL administrative tools that are not installed by default when we deploy the vCenter server.

Once the backup task of the Database is finished, we can raise the vCenter service again.

In this way we have an important backup of our Vcenter Server.

Ricardo Quagliano

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