Automate vCenter Orchestrator Configuration Backups

Last year I wrote an article on how to quickly configure a new vCenter Orchestrator 5.1 appliance which automatically goes through the necessary steps of configuring your vCO appliance and enabling the vCenter Server plugin and associating it with your vCenter Server. These steps are usually performed manually, but when you are looking at deploying multiple vCO instances or even quickly spinning up vCO appliance for testing, this will definitely help speed up your deployment.

Something that I did not consider after completing the vCO setup was backups. Fortunately, this was something that was shared with me recently from a customer who had this exact workflow on backing up their vCO configuration after their initial deployment. This may not be a very well known feature, but vCO provides a very simple mechanism to export your vCO configurations and allows you to restore the configuration in case of a miss-configuration or even deploying a similar configuration to another vCO instance.

Using the same HTTP request trick, to export the vCO configuration you would need to make a request to the following URL:

https://${VCO_IP_ADDRESS}:8283/config_general/ExportConfig_export.action

Similar to the vCO UI, the backup will be stored on the vCO appliance itself and the path will be provided back to you in the message response. To help demonstrate this, I created a simple shell script called backupVCO51.sh which is similar to the setup script in my previous blog article. You can easily take the few lines of code and integrate that with the setup script.

Here is a screenshot of running the backup script:

From the output we can see where the backup configuration is stored on the vCO appliance and you can easily copy the backup to an external system using SCP.

Whether or not you are automating your vCO setup, you should definitely consider performing periodic backups of your vCO configuration, especially before making any changes to your vCO Server.

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