How To Backup ESXi Configuration – The Missing Piece

This came up on #VMware on Freenode this weekend. Basically the concern was “How do I Backup my ESXi USB Key?” Other than ripping the USB key out of a production machine… how was the user to do this? Well, vMA and the vCLI provide a method for this:

Backing up your ESXi Configuration:

To backup your ESXi configuration you’ll be using the vicfg-cfgbackup.pl command as follows:

• Download either the vMA or vCLI
• Launch vicfg-cfgbackup.pl:
  C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>vicfg-cfgbackup.pl –save –server 192.168.15.253 –username root –password password backup.bak
• Note: The backup will be stored relative to your user “AppData” path:
  C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\

Restoring your ESXi Configuration:

Restoring your ESXi config can be done after you have the host up and responding over the network again by using the following:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>vicfg-cfgbackup.pl –load –server 192.168.15.253 –username root –password password backup.bak

Note: You will be asked to reboot the host on restore.

Backing up multiple hosts! – There is a script to backup multiple ESXi hosts on the VMware communities site here. Also in PowerCLI here!

[Edit: Added link to backup multiple ESXi hosts from William in the comments. Thanks William!]
[Edit 2: Added PowerCLI link from NiTRo. Site is in French, PowerCLI is not]