VMware’s Cloud Management Products (CMP) are bundled in the vRealize Suite, bundled with vSphere in the vCloud Suite and are also available as separate components. The CMP includes:
- vRealize Automation and vRealize Orchestrator for self-service provisioning, centralized resource management, automation and orchestration;
- vRealize Business for charge- and showback;
- vRealize LogInsight for log analysis, and;
- vRealize Operations for operations management.
Each product consists of one or more virtual machines/appliances and includes different databases. When deploying the full CMP the different components are linked to eachother. Of course this has implications for backing up the CMP. If you want to have a consistent backup you have to take in account a specific backup order. On top of this, some components require a backup at the same point in time, so let’s have a closer look at the exact details.
Backup order
For the vRealize Cloud Management Platform the backup order is:
- vRealize Business;
- vRealize Log Insight;
- vRealize Operations Manager;
- vRealize Orchestrator;
- vRealize Automation.
vRealize Log Insight, Operations Manager and Orchestrator can all have a clustered setup. In this case (except for vRO) it’s very important your run the backup for the different nodes at the same point-in-time. Consult your backup vendor on how to achieve this.
As you probably know, vRealize Automation consists of different components that also require a specific backup order. The order is:
- Proxy agents, required for connecting to a vCenter Server endpoint;
- DEM Worker(s);
- DEM Orchestrator (single instance);
- Manager service(s);
- Web service(s);
- vRealize Automation appliance;
- PostgreSQL database (since vRA 7 always part of the vRA appliance, vRA 6 also allowed an external PostgreSQL database);
- Microsoft SQL Server database.
Component 1 – 5 + 8 are all part of the IaaS/infrastructure core server. It’s very important that the backup of PostgreSQL and SQL server database is taken at the same point-in-time.
When backing up the CMP platform it’s important that there’s a low utilization.
Restore proces
The restore order for the vRealize CMP is in reverse order, so:
- vRealize Automation;
- vRealize Orchestrator;
- vRealize Operations Manager;
- vRealize LogInsight;
- vRealize Business.
In case of restoring a clustered solution, always restore all the cluster nodes.
For additional details on backup and restore I refer to two must-read whitepapers release by VMware:
- Configuring vRealize Suite 7.0 Backup and Restore by Using Symantec NetBackup 7.6 for vRealize Automation/Orchestrator/Business 7.0 based installations;
- Configuring vRealize Suite 6.0 Backup and Restore by Using Symantec NetBackup 7.6 for vRealize Automation/Orchestrator/Business 6.x based installations;
Although the whitepapers are written with Symantec NetBackup in mind, the whitepapers contain a lot of generic guidelines that are applicable to every (VADP) based backup solution.
