BACKING UP UCS

Backing up UCS can be a little confusing especially since it presents you a few options.  What you may be expecting is something simple like a one button easy “Back it up” button.  But in fact, that is not the case.  And the nice thing about it is there are lots of different things you can do with backup files.
From the Admin Tab under All in UCS Manager, under the general tab, you select “Backup Configuration”

But now, we have a few choices as to how we set this up.  Now you create a backup operation

Then you are presented the below screen and now things get a little bit complicated.

Let’s go through some of these seemingly confusing options:

Admin State

This is a bit confusing.  But here’s how to think about it:  If you want to run the backup now, right this second, when you click “OK” and don’t want to wait, select “Enabled”.  Most of the time this is what you want.  If instead, you just want to save this backup operation, so that you can click it on the Backup operations list and do it, then set disabled.

Type

There are 4 different configurations that can be backed up by UCS.  All of them deal with data that lives in the Fabric Interconnect.  They are illustrated in the diagram below

The brim of the triangle is the Full State.  This is a binary file that can be used to backup on any system to restore the settings that this Fabric Interconnect has.  Its different than all the other types.  Its the only one that can be used for system restore.  This is usually fun to backup off your own system.  I haven’t tried putting it into theplatform emulator yet, but it might be fun to try.

The three other backups are just XML files.  They’re useful for importing into other systems.  The “All Configuration” is just a fancy way of saying “System Configuration” and “Logical Configuration”.  It does both.

The System Configuration is user names, roles, and locals.  This is useful if you are installing another UCS somewhere and you want to keep the same users and locales (if you are using some type of multi-tenancy) but in that case, why aren’t you using UCS Central?  Try it, its free for up to 5 domains.  And you can do global service profiles.

The Logical Configuration is all the pools and policies, service profiles, service profile templates you would expect to be backed up.  This is pretty good to put inside the emulator to fool around with different settings you are using.  Or, if you don’t have your UCS yet and you’re waiting to order it, then you can just create the pools and policies in the emulator.  Then when the real thing comes, import the logical configuration in and you are ready to rock.

The tricky button that shows up when you select the All Configuration or the Logical Configuration is the label:  Preserve Identities. This is only on logical and all configurations because it has to do with making service profiles that are already mapped to pools retain their mapping.  This is good if you’re going to move some service profiles from one fabric interconnect domain to another and want to keep the same setup.  Otherwise, it doesn’t really matter to keep those identities.

The other options presented for how you want to back up the system is pretty self explanatory.  You can either back this up to your local machine or some other machine that has another service running like SSH, TFTP, etc.

After you’ve created a backup operation, the nice thing is that it saves it for you in a backup operations list.  When you want to actually do it, just select it, then hit admin enable and it will perform the backup.

Performing Routine Periodic Backups

But wait you say, what if I want it to periodically backup itself?

Well, that’s where you move to the next tab which is the Policy Backup & Export

Here you have the option of backing up just the binary system restore button, or the all-configuration.  The all configuration is good for backing up XML files just in case some administrator accidentally changes a bunch of configs on you.

Here you can see, My XML and binary files will be backed up every day.  (That may be a little more than you need, as things don’t usually change so much in most environments, but hey, now you have it, use it.)

When it saves to those remote files you’ll get a timestamp on the name:

full-backup.bin.2013-07-28T22-55-11.555
all-config.xml.2013-07-28T22-57-11.559

So that’s backing up the system and all the ways it can be done.  There’s a few nerd nobs, but I wanted to make sure I understood it.

The last thing to cover is import operations.  Its important to understand that you can do two different types:  A merge or replace.  With merge, if you have a MAC pool called A and it has 30 MACs already, a merge will add the new MACs to it.  (So if there are 20 in the import, you will now have 50).  With replace, you’ll now just have 20.  You can only merge XML files.

Lastly, all of this information is found here in the latest  UCS GUI Configuration Guide It was nice to gain a more solid understanding of it.  Backing up is something I go over briefly in some of my tech days I do, but this flushes it out a little better if there are any further questions.