In my previous blog (https://my-sddc.net/creating-a-vcf-lab-on-top-of-vcd-part-2a-certificates/) I did the certificates, this time, we are going to configure the back-ups of the different components in the VCF environment.

I’ll describe the following activities:

• Create SFTP site on my Windows DC
• Configure back-up in the SDDC Manager
• Configure back-ups of the vCenter Servers

Create SFTP site on my Windows DC

If you already have an SFTP site, you can of course use that. I didn’t have one yet, so I thought it would be interesting to describe that process as well, for future reference (for myself as much as for anyone else :)).

This SFTP function is part of the Role and feature-based installation from within Windows (I am running Windows Server Windows 2019 Standard, build 1809).

SFTP is different from FTP(S). Where FTP and FTP(S) are installed through IIS (Internet Information Services), SFTP is using SSH (Secure Shell). So in order to install SFTP we have to install OpenSSH, which is an optional feature within Windows Server. We go to “Settings”, “Apps & features” “Manage optional features” and then click “Add a feature”:

There we select OpenSSH Server and click Install:

We have to start the services OpenSSH and OpenSSH Authentication Agent and set them to start automatically:

I have created a user to use for the backups called svc_backup_vmware. And after all this, I am going to change the “root” directory for this user, to a “Backup” folder, so we have a place to store our backups.

To do this, I used: https://4sysops.com/archives/configure-an-sftp-server-on-windows/#change-the-default-sftp-directory.

And restart the service. After this we can use WinSCP to test the functionality of SFTP on the server:

Configure back-up in the SDDC Manager

Now it is time to configure the backup-settings on the different appliances. First we go to the SDDC Manager and configure the Backup on the tab “Site Settings”:

and confirm, when asked:

I tried setting it up with an FQDN, but that gave me an error message, which I wasn’t (yet) able to fix, but this will work for now. What this does is configure the NSX Managers backups (and perform one immediately (the two different sets of IP-addresses are for both the NSX01 and NSX02 cluster):

We can now also configure the SDDC Manager for a regular backup:

And manually create a back-up to test the functionality:

Configure back-ups of the vCenter Servers

Then we configure the back-up on the vCenter Servers (both):

And manually back-up (with the use of the already configured settings):

And see it all get stored on the backup location:

And so we have set-up the back-up of the environment.