Backing Up A vCenter Appliance

It’s actually built into the 6.5 vCenter Appliance where you can back up the server data. Log in to https://appliance:5480 and under Summary select Backup.

Couple of interesting tips as I proceeded though.

Backup logs are located in /var/log/vmware/applmgmt as backup.log. Could help determine why a backup isn’t working.

In the Appliance, check your settings. My DNS server and Default Gateway were incorrect and no Time Server was set. I made those updates however was getting an error for the Default Gateway. I was able to correct it on the command line of the server though.

# /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net

 Main Menu

0)      Show Current Configuration (scroll with Shift-PgUp/PgDown)
1)      Exit this program
2)      Default Gateway
3)      Hostname
4)      DNS
5)      Proxy Server
6)      IP Address Allocation for eth0
Enter a menu number [0]: 2

Warning: if any of the interfaces for this VM use DHCP,
the Hostname, DNS, and Gateway parameters will be
overwritten by information from the DHCP server.

Type Ctrl-C to go back to the Main Menu

0)      eth0
Choose the interface to associate with default gateway [0]:
Gateway will be associated with eth0
IPv4 Default Gateway [192.168.1.254]:
IPv6 Default Gateway []:
Reconfiguring eth0...
net.ipv6.conf.eth0.disable_ipv6 = 1
Network parameters successfully changed to requested values

 Main Menu

0)      Show Current Configuration (scroll with Shift-PgUp/PgDown)
1)      Exit this program
2)      Default Gateway
3)      Hostname
4)      DNS
5)      Proxy Server
6)      IP Address Allocation for eth0
Enter a menu number [0]: 1

For the actual backup, the Location field needs a bleeding backslash. And it’s absolute. So 192.168.104.60/home/cschelin/vcenter/backups. The process also creates the directory, mkdir -p /home/cschelin/vcenter/backups.

The other error was the statsmonitor wasn’t running. A bit of hunting and found that as well.

# service-control --start vmware-statsmonitor
Perform start operation. vmon_profile=None, svc_names=['vmware-statsmonitor'], include_coreossvcs=False, include_leafossvcs=False
2020-11-25T02:39:26.028Z   Service statsmonitor state STOPPED

Successfully started service statsmonitor

And once that was done, I had a successful backup of the database.