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How To Backup & Restore Free ESXi Host Configuration

02.15.2013 by William Lam // 23 Comments

ESXi host configurations can easily be backed up and restored using either the vCLI's vicfg-cfgbackup or PowerCLI's Get-VMHostFirmware cmdlet. These commands along with others that perform "write" operations are only supported when you have a (paid) licensed version of ESXi. If you are using free ESXi, the remote commands are only available for "read-only" operations. For more details, please refer to this article here.

Note: In my personal opinion, it is much quicker and more efficient to re-install ESXi and apply your configurations using either a scripted deployment such as kickstart or a combination along with post configuration scripts. Re-installs become extremely trivial when you centralize your ESXi host configurations, even for small setups.

Having said that, if you are running free ESXi in a small shop or in a home lab and wish to backup your ESXi host configurations, you can still do so by leveraging a neat little tool called vim-cmd found within the ESXi Shell. There is a section under hostsvc/firmware which manages the ESXi host configuration which also uses the same vSphere APIs that both vicfg-cfgbackup & Get-VMHostFirmeware command uses.

Under this section of vim-cmd, there are four commands:

  • backup_config   
  • reset_config    
  • restore_config  
  • sync_config

Prior to actually backing up your ESXi host configuration, run the following command which will flush the ESXi configuration changes:

vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/sync_config

To backup the ESXi host configurations, run the following command which will generate a file that will be automatically stored in /scratch/downloads and can also be downloaded from a web browser using the URL shown from the output:

vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/backup_config

Before restoring your ESXi host configurations, you will need to ensure the file is renamed to configBundle.tgz and stored under /tmp directory. You will also need to ensure the ESXi host is placed in maintenance mode by running the following command:

vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter

To restore the ESXi host configurations, run the following command and specify the backup configuration file which should reside in /tmp/configBundle.tgz:

vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/restore_config /tmp/configBundle.tgz

Note: Upon completing the restore, it will automatically reboot your ESXi host.

Here is a screenshot using the above commands to backup and then restore ESXi host:

Note: You can not restore an ESXi host using a configuration file backed up from a different host.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // backup, ESXi, free esxi, get-vmhostfirmware, vicfg-cfgbackup, vim-cmd

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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