B&R 12, vSphere 8.2 : HUGE vCenter VM to backup

[sitpi]

Hello,

After upgrading our vCenter appliance from 7.x to 8.x, in our hyperconverged vSAN cluster, we have to add the new vCenter VM in a backup job.
When adding it, it's showing that around 4+To will be backed up.

In vSphere, this vCenter appliance indeed is showing tons of disks, and I guess it's legit as it may need to "keep an eye" on all those disks or whatever checks.
But I highly doubt this all is needed to be backed up so what is the recommended way for this case?

Thank you

Nicolas

[d.artzen]

Personally I don't back up the Vcenter VM and I seem to remember it also not being recommended by VMware to do so. I use a scheduled configuration backup of the Vcenter from the appliance itself to a FTP-Server on another VM, which then is backuped by Veeam. If the Vcenter should really be lost, I can just install a new appliance and restore the configuration from that backup.

[Andreas Neufert]

Please check this one: https://www.veeam.com/kb2328

[sitpi]

Hello Daniel and Andreas,

Thank you for your answers.
As a matter of fact, we're already doing what Daniel is describing, and I was wondering whether an additional VM backup was recommended.
Well, you're reassuring me so that's fine.

Thank you.

Nicolas

[Kwa-GJ]

There is a bug in the vCenter 8 migrate/upgrade for me resulting in a vCenter VM with 4.2 Tb storage allocated.
See here for details https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/78914

To get ik back in the normal size, i made a backup in the vCenter console.
And then used the vcenter deployment app to restore vCenter with a backup.

You have to edit the backup-metadata.json file from your backup to match the new disk sizes:

"SizeInfo": {
"memory": 14,
"lv_root_0": 48,
"imagebuilder": 10,
"dblog": 15,
"archive": 50,
"autodeploy": 10,
"log": 10,
"seat": 10,
"swap1": 25,
"updatemgr": 100,
"vtsdblog": 5,
"lifecycle": 100,
"core": 25,
"netdump": 1,
"vtsdb": 10,
"db": 10,
"lv_lvm_snapshot": 150,