During a maintenance activity such as upgrading, you must backup the vRealize Network Insight deployment to restore later, if required.

  • A collector can store up to 3 days of data after disconnecting from platform.
  • VMware does not recommend you to run VMs with snapshots for more than 3 days.
  • You will not lose any data during the backup process as the collector will continue to collect the data from data sources.
  • After powering on vRNI platform nodes, all data will be processed.

Prerequisites

Take the snapshots of the platform VMs sequentially in the reverse order when the VMs are switched off.
Note:
  • Snapshots are not recommended in production environments.
  • You cannot consider snapshots as a backup.

Procedure

  1. Shutdown all vRealize Network Insight platform VMs sequentially in the reverse order (N,N-1,N-2.….,3,2). For example, if you have a 5 nodes cluster, power off from platform 5 to platform 1.
    Note: Select the Shut Down Guest OS option, and not Power Off.
  2. Initiate the backup by using any VMware backup solution like EMC Avamar, VMware VDP.
  3. Power on all vRealize Network Insight platform VMs sequentially in the forward order (1,2,3....,N-2,N-1,N). For example, if you have a 5 nodes cluster, power on from platform 1 to platform 5.