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I need to make a backup of the vCenter VM itself in OVF format. If I connect to vCenter using the vSphere client, the export to OVF option is greyed out. If I instead connect to one of the ESX hosts, I can see the vCenter VM as an item in the list - but still the option to export is greyed out. How can I extract vCenter itself as an OVF?

Thank you,
m^e

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  • Why do you need to do this? It's an odd request. Can you help us understand the actual goal, as there may be a better way of accomplishing it. E.g. I've never needed to make an OVF export of a vCenter.
    – ewwhite
    Dec 26, 2015 at 0:54

3 Answers 3

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The virtual machine needs to be powered off in order to export it as OVF.

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Shut down vCenter and then connect using the Windows vSphere client directly to the host that vCenter was running on. After doing this, you should be able to export the VM.

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OK, so here you go

The Process to Back-up – Manual

  • Open your vSphere client
  • Turn off the VM you want to back-up
  • Delete and consolidate any snapshots you may have
  • Highlight the VM in the left pane
  • Click File — Export OVF Template
  • Give your export a name, location to export to and whether you want it in single file or multi-file mode. Folder of files (OVF) mode should be used if you want to later deploy the VM over a web server. Single file (OVA) mode should be used if it doesn’t need to be published via a web server. Use if you want to transfer over USB, back-up to some other storage, et cetera.

The Process to Restore

  • Open the vSphere client
  • Click File — Deploy OVF Template
  • Locate the .ova file or input the URL where the .ovf is stored
  • Click Next and input name of the new VM and other fields as necessary

The Process to Back-up – Automatic/scripted

I haven’t looked into automating the back-ups as of yet but I plan on using the vSphere Command-Line Interface to script the entire backup process.

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