VCSA 6.5 Backup and Restore Features

I upgraded the home lab to vsphere 6.5 all around, so this was the first time I had a chance to see the new VCSA 6.5 and check out some really cool new features that I am sure readers will find useful, it now has full backup and restore capability baked right into the appliance. There is no plugin to download or install which is a very nice addition to the suite of available tools us administrators have to fall back on in case of some sort of failure. We will walk through the process of taking a backup as well as the restore process to get a closer look at how this works.


You will need to open the appliance management page at https://yourvcenterserver:5480 and you will see the login page that will require not your SSO account, but the root vCenter username and password that you setup during your vCenter install.

The next step is to click on the Summary icon and click backup which takes you into the wizard and you are presented with a few config options, you will choose your preferred protocol and in our case we will choose the FTPS option for secure ftp. You will need to login to vcenter and enable the PSChealth service for this to work as well.

select the items that you want to backup, the only other option besides the base backup is the Stats, Alarms, and Events information and then give a description if you like.

Here you can see vcenter backup running to my FTP server, its currently uploading files to the directory I have chosen.

It all works really well and the backup took no time at all over a 1Gb link.

Now let's take a look at how the restore functionality works. First you need to mount and open the VCSA iso and click restore

Then you will need to specify the location and credentials of your ftp backup server and backup location for restoring all of the data. 

From here on out things will look very familiar as its the same as a new installation. Thanks for reading!