In the management interface of the appliance, create a backup schedule for generating new backup archives of VMware Cloud Director Availability. Connect and authenticate to an external server using Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) for scheduled uploads of the backup archives as files for future restore to that moment in time.
This procedure is applicable to any the following VMware Cloud Director Availability appliance roles:
- Cloud Director Replication Management Appliance
- Cloud Director Combined Appliance
- On-Premises to Cloud Director Replication Appliance
- vCenter Replication Management Appliance
- On-Premises to Cloud vCenter Replication Appliance
You schedule the backup generation of VMware Cloud Director Availability only by using the management interface of the appliance. The scheduled backup archives contain the following information from each appliance in the site:
- Configuration files
- Public certificate
- Keystore
- Database dump
A backup file does not contain:
- The appliance root user password.
- Any previous backup archives.
- Any support bundles.
- The NTP time server configuration.
- Enable SSH state.
- The network configuration provided in the OVF wizard during appliance deployment.
- Static routes configured on appliances with multiple network interface cards (NICs).
Prerequisites
- Verify that VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.6 or later is installed for configuring the backups interval and its retention period.
Alternatively, for information about backing up the appliances to their local internal storage, see Back Up All Appliances in the Cloud and for all the remaining appliance roles, see Back Up the Appliance.
- Verify that the SFTP server is available and is reachable from VMware Cloud Director Availability.
- Verify that before taking a backup, all VMware Cloud Director Availability services are operational. As exception, unreachable Replicator Service instances without incoming replications do not prevent generating a backup. The scheduled backup generation fails when any other of the services cannot be reached or is not operational.
- Verify that the free disk space value in the bottom of the System health page shows at least 40% amount of free space for each of the VMware Cloud Director Availability appliances in the site. The scheduled backup generation fails when there is insufficient storage.
Procedure
Results
What to do next
- You can later download one of the scheduled backup files directly from the SFTP server for restoring VMware Cloud Director Availability to that moment in time. For information about restoring from a backup archive, see Restore the appliances in the cloud.
- To manually delete backup files, delete them directly from the SFTP server. This action has no effect on the scheduled backup task in the user interface.
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To automatically delete the oldest backups from the SFTP server, configure Retention as shown in step 4.