Month: February 2026

VMware Cloud Foundation Home Lab – Part 9 (Configuration for SDDC, NSX and vCenter Backups)

CaptainvOPs

Blog Date: February 2026

In my previous bog HERE, I walk through the steps of creating a backup directory on a QNAP NAS, enable SFTP connections, and created a service account. In this blog, I will complete the backup configuration in the SDDC manager for this VCF 9 deployment in my home lab.

For VCF 9.0.X, and previous versions, you log into the SDDC manager, and click on Backup on the left side menu under Administration. On the “Site Settings” tab, you then fill in your specifics for backup configuration.

After you click the Save button, go back to the “SDDC Manager Configurations” tab, and now you will be able to click “EDIT” next to the backup schedule.

You can define the backup schedule to suit your needs depending on how busy your environment is, and how often workload domains are updated. This schedule however, does not reflect your NSX backup which is counter intuitive considering enabling the backups in the SDDC manager also enables the backups in NSX. Just not the schedule.

To modify the NSX backup schedule, you’ll need to log into NSX, click the “System” tab, and then select “Backup & Restore” under Lifecycle management on the left menu.

Here you can click “EDIT” to adjust the NSX backup schedule to suite your needs. Click SAVE when finished.

Lastly, we still need to define the backups schedule in the vCenter 5480/vami administration page.

Define the backup schedule that will suit the needs for your environment. Keep in mind that when you install updates/upgrades to the VCF environment, the pre-check will fail if there’s not a recent backup within the last 24 hours. My advise here would be to schedule daily backups to avoid the precheck critical failure. Honestly, it should just be a warning, but I digress…

After you define a backup schedule, it’s a good idea to manually kick off a backup job to be sure the configuration works.

VMware Cloud Foundation Home Lab – Part 8 (QNAP NAS Configuration for SDDC and vCenter Backups)

CaptainvOPs

Blog Date: February 2026

Continuing my series on my new VCF 9 Home Lab build (My VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Home Lab), in this post I’ll go over the basic setup for SFTP backups that need to be configured for the SDDC, NSXT, and vCenter, using my QNAP NAS.

First, a service account should be created for these backup jobs. In this example, I have a service account called ‘vcenterbkup’ already created for my old VMware lab, and just plan to reuse it. You can either make this user part of the administrators group to allow SSH/SFTP connections, or you can tinker and edit the SSH configuration files (e.g., /etc/config/ssh/sshd_config) by adding AllowUsers directives.

According to QNAP, in order to enable SFTP connections to the NAS, the SSH service must be enabled first, and then the SFTP enablement will be available. Go to Telnet/SSH in the Control Panel, and enable these services.

Hit the Edit Access Permission button, and add the service account created earlier, in this example ‘vcenterbkup’.

You’ll need to create a shared folder on the NAS, and assign the service account created earlier, in this example ‘vcenterbkup’, with read/write privileges. In this example, I used the folder name of ‘VCF-Backup’.

The size of the folder will depend on your backup strategy for your home lab. One important note, even though the folder path shows as “/VCF-Backup” in the UI, the actual directory will be ‘/share/VCF-Backup/ ‘. This will be important later when backups in the SDDC manager and vCenter are configured.

Lastly, I created sub directories inside the VCF-Backup folder. One called ‘SDDCNSX-Backup’, and the other called ‘vCenter-Backup’.

In my next blog, I’ll cover configuring the backups in the SDDC manager, NSXT, and vCenter. NSXT gets configured when the backups are configured in the SDDC manager, however it will need to be tweaked.