It is recommended to perform periodic backups of your flexVDI Manager instance, and keep it in a safe place. By following this best practice, if you need to do a complete restore of all your environment, you won't need to define every logical object created on your infrastructure again. Also, flexVDI Licenses are stored in the flexVDI Manager, so keeping a backup will help you not being stuck without a license if you reinstall flexVDI Manager. There are two tools that can help you doing a backup of the flexVDI Manager instance:

• flexVDI Config, for interactive backups.
• manager_backup, for command line or scripting.

Backups are always restored with flexVDI Config.

Interactive backup and restore

The flexVDI Config tool allows you to backup the flexVDI Manager database. You can use this backup to recover your platform configuration in case of failure. In order to create a backup, follow these steps in the hosts that is currently running your Manager instance:

1. Select Manager in the main menu of flexvdi-config.
2. Select Backup.
3. Enter the current password for your instance of flexVDI Manager.
4. Select a destination directory for the backup file. By default, it is /var/lib/flexvdi/backup.
5. Select a backup name. By default, it is flexvdi_backup followed by the current date and time.
6. The backup progress will be shown, and the tool will notify the result.

To restore a backup, follow these steps:

1. Select Manager in the main menu of flexvdi-config.
2. Select Restore.
3. Enter the current password for your instance of flexVDI Manager.
4. Select the directory where the backup resides.
5. Select the backup file you want to recover.
6. Confirm the operation, and wait until the recover progress finishes.

Backing up from the command line

This form of backup is ideal for integration into scripts, scheduled tasks or remote administration tools.

For a complete list of options supported by manager_backup, run it with the --help argument:

[root@flexdemo01 ~]# manager_backup --help
Usage: manager_backup -d BACKUP_DIR [options]
Options:
  -h, --help           show this help message and exit
  -d BACKUP_DIR        save backup on BACKUP_DIR
  -n BACKUP_NAME       use BACKUP_NAME as filename
  -w MANAGER_PASSWORD  password for this flexVDI Manager instance
  -f                   overwrite existing backup file
  -q                   supress output messages

The only mandatory argument is -d, which is used to identify the target directory for the backup. But we usually must also use -w to state the password for the flexVDI Manager instance. If you the -n argument is not used, a file name based on the current date of the system will be automatically generated for this backup.

Usage example

In the following example we'll launch the manager_backup locally from the installed Host, generate a backup copy in the /flexvdi/backup directory, and use the default password for the flexVDI Manager instance.

[root@flexdemo01 ~]# manager_backup -d /flexvdi/backup -w flexvdi
Creating a temporal directory...
Backing up MongoDB...
Copying network configuration...
Creating tarball...
Downloading backup...
Cleaning temporal directory...
Finishing...
A new backup has been stored on /flexvdi/backup/flexvdi_backup_021114_1016.tgz