Regular backups of the management components ensures that you can keep your environment operational if a data loss or failure occurs.
You implement scheduled backups to prepare for:
A critical failure of a management component.
An upgrade of a management component.
A certificate update of a management component.
In addition, as a best practice, you can take on-demand manual backups in the following use cases:
After a successful recovery operation.
After resolving asynchronously reported errors in SDDC components.
After resolving an incomplete workflow in SDDC Manager.
After noting the failure of a scheduled backup of an SDDC component.
Immediately before performing a system upgrade.
You can backup and restore SDDC Manager with a file-based or an image-based solution. File-based backup is recommended for customers who are not using composable servers.
For a file-based backup of the SDDC Manager appliance, you can configure a backup schedule and enable task-based (state-change driven) backups. When task-based backups are enabled, a backup is triggered after each SDDC Manager task such as workload domain and host operations or password rotation. You can also define a backup retention policy to comply with your company's retention policy.
By default, NSX Manager file-based backups are taken and stored on an SFTP server that is built into the SDDC Manager appliance. It is recommended that you configure an external SFTP server as a backup location for the following reasons:
An external SFTP server is a prerequisite for restoring SDDC Manager file-based backups.
Using an external SFTP server provides better protection against failures because it decouples NSX-T Data Center backups from SDDC Manager.
By default, VMware Cloud Foundation does not configure any file-based or image-based backup protection for the vCenter Servers.
This section of the documentation provides instructions on backing up and restoring SDDC Manager, NSX-T Data Center and vCenter Server.
