About backing up the appliance

Insight Control server provisioning provides the ability to save your configuration settings and management data to a backup file and enables you to use that backup to restore a corrupted appliance in the event of a catastrophic failure.

The backup process involves creating a backup file and then downloading that file so that you can store it to a safe and secure (off-appliance) location for future use.

For advice on creating and archiving a backup file, see Best practices for backing up an appliance.

For the procedure on creating a backup file from the UI, see Back up an appliance.


	IMPORTANT: In the unlikely event you need to restore the appliance, Hewlett Packard Enterprise recommends backing up your appliance configuration on a regular basis, preferably daily and especially:

To prevent a backup file from being overwritten or deleted, download it and save it to an off-appliance location before running the next backup process. The appliance stores one backup file or one support dump file on the appliance at a time. Creating a backup file replaces the current backup file or support dump file. Likewise, creating a support dump file replaces the previous support dump or the backup file.

If you start a backup while a support dump is in progress, the backup operation does not proceed until the support dump operation completes. If you (as the Infrastructure administrator) start a support dump while a backup operation is in progress, you have the option of cancelling the backup and proceeding with the support dump.

The backup file has the format:

appliance-host-name_backup_yyyy-mm-dd_hhmmss.bkp

For example, the backup file myhost_backup_2014–02–01_092700.bkp was created for the appliance host name myhost on February 1, 2014 at 9:27 a.m.

Insight Control server provisioning provides a Backup administrator user role specifically for backing up the appliance by permitting access to other resource views without permitting actions on those resources, or other tasks. Only the Infrastructure administrator or the Backup administrator can create a backup file, either through the UI or REST APIs.

What the backup process backs up	What the backup process does not back up
IC server provisioning database System files: Non-database data Audit log License files	Non-data files: Static files that are installed as part of the execution environment, and are not specific to the appliance or managed environment configuration Log files (except the Audit log file) Appliance network configuration First-time setup configuration files

Use a backup file to do the following:

Restore the appliance from which the backup file was created.
Restore the settings to a different appliance. For example, if an appliance fails and cannot be repaired, you can use a backup file to restore the management configuration settings and management data to a replacement appliance created from the same version of the virtual machine image.

You can use the UI to create a backup file.

REST APIs let you:

Schedule a backup process from outside the appliance.
Collect backup files according to your site policies.
Integrate with enterprise backup and restore products.

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