vCenter back up

[dperera]

Hello.

I have 4 servers with ESXi 7.0.
There is one vCenter 7.0.3 deployed.
All 4 servers are doing a vSAN cluster with DRS and HA.
Now I have to delete everything but I want to be able to recover all the actual configuration in the future.

What is the best / easiest / quickest way?

I thought of doing a vCenter back up now, then in the future I will just have to install ESXi again on the servers, deploy a vCenter again and restore the back up copy.

Thanks in advance.

[RajeevVCP4 · Accepted solution]

You need to configure backup of VCSA , but your other virtual machine will not restore for vms required other back up solution

https://www.ubackup.com/enterprise-backup/vcenter-backup.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDj-R99b6sY&t=67s

[CallistoJag · Accepted solution]

As other poster has said, you need to back up the VMs separately. Also the backup of vCenter will be dependant on the base ESXi's being configured with same IP/hostnames again first. So you might want to record these settings too. 🙂

[dperera]

thanks a lot, Rajeev

[dperera]

thank you!

[markey165 · Accepted solution]

You may also want to consider separately backing up the Virtual Distributed switch if you have one, which allows you to restore the Distributed switch independently of other backup mechanisms

See VMware docs - Backing Up and Restoring a vSphere Distributed Switch Configuration

[dperera]

thank you, Markey!
but, vCenter buck up does include VDSs, right?

[markey165]

It does indeed. This is just a mechanism to backup/restore the vDS independently, should you have a need to.

Just thought i'd mention it, in case it was useful for your requirements 😊