How to Perform vCenter Backup to Windows Share Step by Step

Case: vCenter backup to Windows share?

VMware vCenter Server and VMware ESXi are the 2 core components of the vSphere suite. As VMware ESXi is the most popular type-1 hypervisor, vCenter Server is the official robust centralized management utility, that is used to manage virtual machines, multiple ESXi hosts, and all dependent components from a single centralized location.

If you are running vSphere Distributed Switches and other highly vCenter-centric vSphere infrastructure, you may want to back up your VMware Virtual Center server to avoid losing important configurations. In fact, you can use the vCenter Server Management Interface to back up the vCenter Server instance, but many may find themselves encountered errors when vCenter backup to Windows share.

In this article, I will show you how to successfully backup vCenter to Windows share.

How to backup vCenter to Windows share

With the official backup feature provided, the process of vCenter Server Backup becomes very simple. To backup vCenter through the vCenter Server Management Interface, you are mainly backing up the configuration and database of it, and you can schedule the backups of these important settings and data from vCenter Server.

The vCenter backups can be sent over the following protocols:

• FTPS
• HTTPS
• SFTP
• FTP
• NFS
• SMB
• HTTP

Among them, you can use the SMB protocol to backup vCenter to Windows share. Here I will show you the detailed steps.

How to backup vCenter to Windows share:

1. Access the vCenter Server Management Interface as root, and navigate to Backup from the left inventory, click Configure button next to Backup Schedule.

2. It will open a Create Backup Schedule wizard. Specify the Backup location as your Windows file share target for the vCenter Server backup.

3. Provide the Backup server credentials. Please note that when configuring a Windows file share target, the username cannot be in the NETBIOS format, or you will receive the error: Failed to mount the remote storage.

To avoid this, you need to use the UPN username format.

4. Configure Schedule, Encrypt backup (optional), DB Health Check, Number of backups to retain, and Data according to your need. Click Create to complete.

5. Now you can click Backup Now to run an ad-hoc backup. You can check the Use backup location and user name from Backup Schedule option to auto fill in details, makes it more convenient.

6. Then you can click Start, the Status will show in Activity.

Real data insurance: virtual machine backups

vCenter Server is a very convenient official platform for centrally managing ESXi virtual environments and large numbers of VMs on it. Although VMware provide an official feature to backup vCenter configurations, but it does not provide the feature of virtual machine backup. And the VM data is what really matters.

And that makes backup software a commonly accepted choice. Here I introduce you to a VMware backup software AOMEI Cyber Backup, it enables you to backup multiple VMs in 3 simple steps. And it offers you the following benefits.

✦ Agentless Backup: create complete and independent image-level backup for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V VMs.
✦ Support Free ESXi: support both paid and free versions of VMware ESXi.
✦ Batch VM Backup: batch backup large numbers of VMs managed by vCenter Server, or multiple VMs on a standalone ESXi host.
✦ Multiple Storage Destinations: backup to local drive, or network destinations like Windows share or NAS.
✦ Automated Execution: schedule to automate backups daily, weekly, and monthly with email notifications.

Next, I will show you how to backup multiple VMware ESXi VMs via AOMEI Cyber Backup. You can click the following button to download the 30-day free trial.

*You can choose to install this VM backup software on either Windows or Linux system.

3 easy steps to perform VMware ESXi backup

1. Bind Devices: Access to AOMEI Cyber Backup web client, navigate to Source Device > VMware > + Add VMware Device to Add vCenter or Standalone ESXi host. And then click … > Bind Device.

2. Create Backup Task: Navigate to Backup Task > + Create New Task, and then set Task Name, Backup Type, Device, Target, Schedule, and Cleanup.

• Device: batch select large numbers of VMs managed by vCenter Server for centralized backup.

• Target: select to back up to a local path, or to a network path.
• Schedule (optional): perform full, differential, or incremental backup, and automate execution according to the frequency you specified.

• Cleanup (optional): automatically delete the old backup copies that exceed the retention period you specified.

3. Run Backup: Click Start Backup and select Add the schedule and start backup now, or Add the schedule only.

Created backup tasks will be listed and monitored separately, for restoring, progress checking and schedule changing.

When restoring, you can also restore to new location to create a new VM in the same or another datastore/host directly from the backup, saving the trouble of re-configuring the new VM.

Summary

vCenter backup is a great way to protect your important configurations. Since most users have a common Windows file share in the environment, which makes the time to get it up and running very easy and fast., so you might want to perform vCenter backup to Windows share. This article showed you the steps to backup vCenter to Windows share using the official feature.

However, there is no official feature to backup VMware ESXi VMs, but the VM data is what really matters. You can try AOMEI Cyber Backup, a dedicated backup tool.