vCenter Server Appliance - Avamar backup

In all Avamar versions VMware guides you can find a section named "Protecting the vCenter Management Infrastructure".

On that section you will be able to find the best practices for vcenter protection, basically we recommend the implementation of guest backup on each virtual infrastructure host, including SQL guest backup of DB used by vCenter, UpdateManage, SRM, etc...

Let me know if you need further clarification.

Regards

Hello,

The section on 'Protecting the vCenter Management Infrastructure' only mentions vCenter as installed on a Windows OS.  vCenter Server Appliance is a security hardened Linux-based appliance.  I could not find any mention of the vCSA on the document.  This is the 7.1 Avamar for VMware User Guide.  Since it is a VM appliance, you would think it would be a simple process to add it to the VM - image level backups.

The only way I can think that it will allow me to do it, would be to allow multiple client names on the grid and re-add it?  Does that makes sense?

From what I can tell VMware only fully supports restores using provided postgres database backup script.

For 6.0 I believe all you need to do is backup the postgres database.  You can deploy a new vCenter appliance and restore the postgres database.

See: VMware KB: Backing up and restoring the vCenter Server 6.0 embedded vPostgres database

For 5.x You need to backup postgres database and VM.  It specifically states you need to backup both the database and the VM.

See: VMware KB: Backing up and restoring the vCenter Server Appliance vPostgres database

In practice I doubt all that many people follow VMware's best practices because its not practical to stop services and run a manual backup or spend the time to create a custom script.  If you want a fully supported restore path for vCenter don't use the virtual appliance.  In my experience if its a small basic vCenter I do a VM backup of the vCenter appliance which will probably work most of the time.  Worst case scenario (which should be extremely rare) a new vCenter can be built with little to no impact to a business.  For things like Horizon View that heavily rely on vCenter I recommend not using the virtual appliance.

I hope at some point VMWare\EMC can engineer a way to support VM backups of the vCenter appliance. It would make all backup administrators life a lot easier.

I actually kind of figured it out, thou the postgres option is good to know.

In the Avamar VMware document, after it discusses Vcenter protection for the Windows version, it discusses VM image backups for Host not managed by VCenter. 

So if you are doing an image backup of VCenter, then the image restore will require you to un-manage one of the Host in your cluster, then add the Host to Avamar as a client.

Then restore the VCenter image backup to the un-managed Host.

Then re-add the Host to VCenter cluster.

May you refer to the document?

sohaim -  this document

Thank you very much

It seems like an old thread ... However, here is something I've found useful.

Essential VMware vSphere 7 Skills: Backing Up and Restoring vCenter Server (youtube.com)