With the release of vSphere 6.5 VMware has introduced a new method for creating a backup of the vCenter Appliance. This method is available from the vCenter Appliance web management interface on port 5480 (https://applianceaddress:5480). In this article I will explain how to create a backup and what the restore procedure is.

With the release of vSphere 6.5 VMware has introduced a new method for creating a backup of the vCenter Appliance. This method is available from the vCenter Appliance web management interface on port 5480 (https://applianceaddress:5480).

Tip: Starting with vSphere 6.7 scheduling functionality has been added as a native feature in the appliance, eliminating the need for this workflow. It still applies to vSphere 6.5.

Running the VMware vSphere 6 vCenter Appliance on the Ravello Systems cloud is not supported in its native format. If you have created a local working copy of the appliance then you can import it into the Ravello Systems cloud environment. When you then want to Edit and Verify the imported virtual machine an error message will be generated that Ravello Systems only supports 7 virtual disks but the appliance was created by VMware with 11 virtual disks.

In this image you can see disks 10 and 11 of the imported appliance:

Bottom line of this article: use .OVF format for your VMs

When importing OVA's from my local system to Ravello Systems I ran into an error. Which was strange because I had imported similar machines just a few days before. The error message was the following: 

Referenced disk/s do not exist:
'[u'/var/folders/yv/g8hl5r3n6518yf3w6d95kbj00000gn/T/tmpQ_Z7y8ravello/vSphere6-ICM-v2-ESXi01-disk1.vmdk']s'