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.