Hi Team,
I have been successfully running the vcenter backup with the shell script VMware vSphere 6.5 Documentation Library Backup Shell Script with few enhancements such as NFS storage end point, logging, email capabilities. As you can see it is a bunch of HTTP GET/POST requests that make up the script. Also, from VAMI(Vcenter Appliance Management Interface Web console) we can manually take backup, which I suspect uses the same API calls (please clarify once.)
I was playing around with the APIs in Postman. My doubts are around the payload that is being sent the job creation API endpoint.
API Endpoint - https://<vcenter address or psc address>/rest/appliance/recovery/backup/job
Http Method - POST
Request Body -
{
"piece": {
"location_type": "<Backup Protocol>",
"comment": "Automatic backup",
"parts": ["seat"],
"location": "<backup storage location Backup Protocol URI>",
"location_user": "Backup Protocol User",
"location_password": "Backup Protocol User Password"
}
}
Question:
1. How/Where can I use the "comment" part asked in the body?
2. What is "parts" ? and how/when to use it in real life? (In case of PSC backup it should be a blank list. i.e. "parts":[])
A little bit about parts -
There is an API endpoint which gives the available parts for backup
API Endpoint - https://<vcenter address or psc address>/rest/appliance/recovery/backup/parts
Http Method - GET
Response body -
a. For PSC
{
"value": [
{
"selected_by_default": true,
"name": {
"args": [],
"default_message": "common",
"id": "com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.common_part_name"
},
"description": {
"args": [],
"default_message": "Inventory and configuration.",
"id": "com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.common_part_description"
},
"optional": false,
"id": "common"
}
]
}
b. For VCenter
{
"value": [
{
"selected_by_default": true,
"name": {
"args": [],
"default_message": "common",
"id": "com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.common_part_name"
},
"description": {
"args": [],
"default_message": "Inventory and configuration.",
"id": "com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.common_part_description"
},
"optional": false,
"id": "common"
},
{
"selected_by_default": true,
"name": {
"args": [],
"default_message": "Stats, Events, Alarms, and Tasks",
"id": "com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.seat_part_name"
},
"description": {
"args": [],
"default_message": "Historical data (Statistics, Events and Tasks) in vCenter Server database.",
"id": "com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.seat_part_description"
},
"optional": true,
"id": "seat"
}
]
}
3. As it is shown in the above response body,
a. Part ids available for vcenter (2 No.) - seat, common
b. Part ids available for PSC (1 No.) - common
Currently the VCenter backup is done using "part":["seat"]
but as shown in the above response body what happens to the parts in "id":"common" ?
When I restored the backup, the vcenter looked just fine.
So I am assuming the "part":["seat"] == "part":["seat", "common"]
is that correct?
Thank you.