Backing up and restoring the management subsystem

How to backup your management subsystem, configure scheduled database backups, and restore your management subsystem on VMware.

Management subsystem backups are intended for restoration in the same VMware environment where they were taken, or a different VMware environment that has the same network configuration, endpoints, and deployment profile.

A management subsystem backup consists of:

  • Project directory backup.

    The original project directory that was created with the apicup command during the initial product installation is essential for disaster recovery, see: Preparing to install API Connect in VMware.

  • Management certificates backup.

    Backup your management subsystem certificates by using the dr-preparation script.

  • Management database backup.

    Your management database backup contains everything that you create and configure in the Cloud Manager and API Manager UI (APIs, products, TLS profiles, user registries, and so on), or with the toolkit CLI or REST API. You configure your management subsystem to run scheduled database backups. You can also take database backups on-demand.

    You configure your database backups with apicup commands ran from your project directory. Therefore, to restore the management database backup after a disaster, you must first restore your project directory.

VMware snapshots

Take a Virtual Machine (VM) snapshot of all your management VMs; see Using VM snapshots for infrastructure backup and disaster recovery. Taking snapshots does require a brief outage while all the VMs in the subsystem cluster are shut down - do not take snapshots of running VMs, as they might not restore successfully. VM snapshots can provide faster recovery when compared to redeploying VMs and restoring from a database backup.

Important: VM snapshots are not an alternative to taking API Connect project directory, certificate, and database backups. Do not rely solely on VM snapshots for your backups.