vCenter 6u2 appliance

[mpasaa]

Anyone experience problems or issues when backing up the vcenter 6 appliance? We've been having issues where it becomes unreachable even though all services appear started on the appliance. I am pointing to the host where it resides and using vmtools to quiesce the VM which is Veeam's recommendations but wanted to reach out and see if this appliance has any caveats when using Veeam to back it up? Never had problems with the 5.5 windows vcenter but since migrating we've encountered intermittent problems and I wanted to see if this backup process disrupts vcenter appliance (or this suse linux) enough to cause intemittent problems. Backups do show as successful.

[foggy]

Hi Mike, haven't you tracked the moment when vCenter becomes unreachable? Does it correspond to the snapshot commit phase of the backup? You can also review this thread for some further considerations.

[mpasaa]

Unfortunately, I am not watching backups happen as these are occurring during overnight hours. However, I have disabled backups for now and when I re-enabled will back up during the day so I can determine if this backup process is causing the issues or not. I suspect Nessus scanning by our security teams is disrupting traffic and might even be happening as snapshots are occurring which would cause backup issues. We've had Nessus scans kill our ILO interfaces in our chassis plus break the Brocade management interfaces at times too and even cause server VMs to be "sort of" network connected and we would eventually have to reset them to get them fully network connected.

That said, the odd thing is that when I SSH to the appliance or even open the browser to 5480 and connect to the appliance all services appear started and the appliance healthy. If I didn't know better, I would think some sort of websense or FW rule is preventing communication.

As for the backup configuration itself, I have it configured per Veeam's recommendations--using vmtool quiescence, no application processing obviously since it's not windows, and configured as its own job with no other VMs in the backup task. It's vsphere 6u2 with latest build updates on this appliance and my Veeam is now 9.5.

I opened a ticket with vmware and uploaded support bundles and the only thing they found was this: 497 instances of -- execution took too long but not sure what that means--postgres DB took too long, network connectivity took long, etc.? Waiting on a reply from them but not much to go on. O

[jhouse]

We move over to the VMware appliance 3 weeks ago and Have had trouble backing up the Vsphere appliance. Call support Ticket numbers -02263408 and 02223885 having trouble backup up Vcenter. Removed the Vcenter from the VCENTER host and added it to the Standalone host so we could back up this up. It worked once or twice now last week had to make changes to that host had to vmotion vcenter over to another host and then back so it could backup but to my surprise, it failed. On ticket 2263408 now being told that every time I vmotion the vcenter over to another host and back will have to be removed and replace the VM in the backup job to get it to backup correctly. This is a big inconvenience to have to do this way. Is this right on the VMware appliance.

[AndyGDIT]

We also moved over to the VCSA with 6.5 about a month ago. We also dont use Veeam to backup the Appliance, as it has a backup feature builtin where we back it up to another server where we back that up with Veeam.

I believe that it is Best Practice to use the builtin feature for backup rather than use a snapshot backup like Veeam.

[jhouse]

We are still on Veeam 9.5 update 2 with VMware 6.0 update 2 I don't think it has that feature that I know of.

[AndyGDIT]

If you have the database exclusions selection from the main menu, I think you can exclude it from the backup. I know it works on the Windows install of vCenter, unsure of the appliance.

[AndyGDIT]

try this

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micro ... Id=2091961