Backup and Restore NSX Manager

Manish Jha

Like any other infrastructure componet, backup of NSX manager is very critical as it helps in recovering configuration in event of a NSX manager corruption/failure etc.

Before software defined networking was introduced, backup of network configuration was a very cumbersome task as you have many components to backup such as Routers, Switches,Firewalls and what not. 

With introduction of NSX, all the networking intelligence were injected in NSX and this reduced the administrative overhead of backing up each networking components individually. With NSX you only have to worry about backing up NSX manager and the vDS at vCenter level which stores all your virtualwires. In this post we will learn how to backup NSX manager and distributed switches.

Configure NSX Manager Backup

To configure backup of NSX manager, login to NSX manager UI (https://NSX-FQDN/) and click on Backup & Restore option from home page.

You can send NSX manager backups to a remote FTP or SFTP server. In this post I will be demostrating FTP method.

Under FTP server settings” click on change”

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Specify following:

  • IP/Hostname: IP address or hostname of the remote FTP server.
  • Transfer Protocol: FTP
  • Port: 21
  • Username: User created on FTP server for ftp access
  • Password: Password of the ftp user
  • Backup directory: Typically this is hoem directory of user created on FTP server.
  • Filename Prefix: Ay prefix you want to define
  • Passphrase: A passphrase to secure NSX manager backup.

Hit OK to save configuration.

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To run a backup immidiately, click on backup button under “Backup History”

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Click on start to initiate backup.

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Wait for backup wizard to complete. Once backup is complted, you will see a new record getting populated under “Backup Hostory”

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I logged into my FTP server and verified that NSX manager backup was dumped there.

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Schedule NSX Manager Backup

You can also create a backup schedule to automate backup process. Under Scheduling, click the Change button and specify backup frequency and start time etc and click on schedule button.

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If you want to exclude something from NSX manager backup, then select those entries and hit OK. Next time when NSX manager backup will run, entities which you excluded won’t be backed up. 

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Restore NSX Manager Backup

If your NSX manager have gone rouge and there is no way to fix it, then to restore NSX manager, you have to first deploy a fresh NSX manager of same version as your original NSX manager and then restore the data from the backup.

Once you have deployed a fresh NSX manager then login to the appliance and click on the Backup and Restore tab.

Under FTP Server Settings add the details of the FTP/SFTP Server that hosts your NSX Manager backups.Once that is configured you will be able to see the available backups to restore from.

Select the backup to restore from and hit the Restore button.

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Hit yes to start the restore process. Your NSX manger will be restarted to complete the restore process.

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And that’s it for this post.

I hope you find this post informational. Feel free to share this on social media if it is worth sharing. Be sociable 🙂

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