Considerations for Backing Up and Restoring vSphere with Tanzu

This topic provides an overview of the backup and restore process for vSphere with Tanzu, and provides high-level considerations for implementing your backup and restore strategy for vSphere with Tanzu.

Scenario	Tools	Comments
Backup and restore vSphere Pods	Velero Plugin for vSphere	Install and configure the plug-in on the Supervisor. Note: The plug-in is not backing up the Supervisorstate. See Install and Configure the Velero Plugin for vSphere on the Supervisor. See Backup and Restore vSphere Pods Using the Velero Plugin for vSphere.
Backup stateless and stateful workloads on a Tanzu Kubernetes Gridcluster and restore to a cluster provisioned by Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.	Velero Plugin for vSphere	Backup and restore both Kubernetes metadata and persistent volumes. You can use Velero snapshotting (not Restic) for persistent volumes. See Install and Configure the Velero Plugin for vSphere on the Supervisor. See Backup and Restore TKG 2 Cluster Workloads Using the Velero Plugin for vSphere.
Backup stateless and stateful workloads on a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster and restore to a conformant Kubernetes cluster not provisioned by Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.	Standalone Velero and Restic	Use standalone Velero for portability. Must include Restic for stateful applications. See Install and Configure Standalone Velero and Restic on TKG 2 Clusters on Supervisor. See Backup and Restore Workloads on TKG 2 Cluster Workloads on Supervisor Using Standalone Velero and Restic.
Supervisor After a Supervisor upgrade, you must do a new backup. Restoring a vCenter Server instance to a backup where it expects an older version of a Supervisor is not supported.	vCenter Server Velero Plugin for vSphere Standalone Velero and Restic	Restore vCenter Server from backup. vCenter Server recreates all three Supervisor control plane VMs. Restore cluster workloads from backup using the plug-in or standalone Velero and Restic.
vCenter Server Configuration	vCenter Server	If vCenter Server is lost, use vCenter Serverto backup and restore vCenter Server objects. See Backup and Restore vCenter Server.
NSX	NSX Manager	Load balancer and ingress services depend on NSX backup. Use NSX Manager to backup and restore the NSX database. See Backup and Restore NSX-T Data Center.