Hi, this is Jennifer, principal engineer from VxRail Global Support.
In this video, we will cover how to back up VxRail Manager on a system that is already in production. This is not a new deployment and a first run upgrade.
The file-based backup mechanism is designed to help you to recover the VxRail Manager in the event of unrecoverable failure. So it requires you to use a backup script on the VxRail Manager VM that will back up all the configuration files, the database tables, and, optionally, the logs.
This script can be run manually or it can be set up for an automatic backup on a scheduled basis. So, I'm just going to connect first to the VxRail Manager via SSH.
And I'm going to switch to root as well. So we will start with the manual backup and then I will show you how to schedule the automatic one. We will need to access first "/mystic/vxm_backup_restore/" and the script will be there already on your VxRail Manager.
To create a backup, you can choose if you want to include the logs or if you don't want to include them. So if you don't want the logs, then we're just going to use this command, and we're going to use "-b". So, just to highlight again, this will not include the logs.
I will show you now, if you want to do a backup that does include the logs, then you will do "-b" and then we will add "--keeplog". So now we have two backups, one with logs and one without the logs.
And when this command process has ended, then I will show you how we can verify that the backup was completed and we can list all the backup copies that we have stored in our VxRail Manager.
All right, so the backup has finished, and now, as we mentioned before, we can check, like list all the backup copies, so it will be with the same command, but this time adding "-l". So... It can take a couple of minutes, just be patient, but then you will be able to see the list of all the backups you have available in case of issues.
Now, we will cover how to do the automatic backup, how to configure it so the VxRail Manager can do it automatically according to the backup policy that we will define. The
first step could be to check, what is the timestamp that is configured on your VxRail Manager, so you can run the command "date" and it will show you.
We will be using the same script, so if we just run "python" and then we will just need to add this time "-c", so it will give us the options, in this case it's showing us that I already have a backup configured that is happening every Sunday.
It gives you the time and the options, in this case we have requested not to keep the logs, and the limit of backup files that are stored. OK, so I'm just going to give it a quick test to show you, if I click "yes" it will give us four options, the first one is "manual", so that means that you don't have an automatic backup.
This is the option that you need to choose if, for example, you want to cancel your automatic backup. Then, if you want to go ahead with the automatic backup, you can choose "daily", "weekly", or "monthly", for example, I'm just going to click number "3" for "weekly", set the day of the week, OK, so current is "0", which is our Sunday, so I'm just going to put, as a test, Monday, and then you will need to choose the time.
So then, if you go ahead, just going to keep the same time, current keep log is "0", I don't want to change it, current rotation is "7", it's weekly, so do you want to change it? No. And that's how we have changed, if you can see here, to Monday.
So I will leave the backup as "automatic" but, as mentioned, you can go back and click "manual" if you want to cancel it, or there is another option, that is going to be to do it by typing instead of using this script.
So you can just put "--period" and then you can add "manual". So that could be exactly the same as if you choose the first option. But, for now, I want to keep the automatic backup as this is the recommendation from Dell, in case we run into an unrecoverable failure.
So that's all for today, thank you for your time and have a nice day.
