Forum Discussion

speachey's avatar
speachey
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Jul 24, 2024

VMWare Backups of active VEs?

We collect nightly UCS files of all of our BIG-IP VEs.  If we need to restore from UCS, it requires requesting the build of a new guest before we can apply the latest UCS backup (VMWare is managed by...
backup
backup automation
  • speachey's avatar
    speachey
    Jul 29, 2024

    Reply from F5 Support:


    Thank you for reaching out to F5 Support. My name is Manisha from NA region and will be assisting you with the service request. Please let me know if these hours align with your needs. If not, we can reassign the case to a desired region.

    1. Yes, as stated it the article F5 does not support the Snapshot process being used on a BIG-IP.

    Recommended Actions

    Creating and archiving backups should be done regularly and prior to any upgrade. The only supported method is to do so via an F5 UCS Archive.

    2. Regarding your 2nd query --> there is a script that resides on the system as a cron job, that does automatic backups and even transfers these backups to a remote server, if properly set up. Please see below articles for automated UCS backups on BIG-IP :

    https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K13418 ---> Archiving UCS files using the logrotate and crontab utilities (11.x - 17.x)
    https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K78344940 ---> Schedule automated UCS backups on the BIG-IP system

    ****************************************************************************
     
    Kind Regards,
    Manisha Kota | Service Provider Engineer

Lucas_Thompson's avatar
Lucas_Thompson
Icon for Employee rankEmployee
Jul 24, 2024

From experience using vsphere for lots of lab BIG-IPs, DB (MCP and REST both) problems do sometimes happen when you snapshot and do hard shutdowns. And the fact that the running-config isn't necessarily the same as the saved-config.

I'd expect that you could issue a "tmsh save sys config" to align the running-config and saved-config, then "bigstart stop" to quiesce the system and it'd be OK to move/snapshot. At that point, there shouldn't be any consequential open files. To recover you'd of course need to reboot or "bigstart start" the system.

  • speachey's avatar
    speachey
    Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
    Jul 26, 2024

    Thanks for the response.  F5 support confirmed that UCS backups are still the only recommended backup procedure to avoid service disruption.  It is rare we need to restore VEs, and we will continue collecting UCS archives nightly.