vCenter and its components have become a critical piece of the virtual infrastructure. The vCenter Server is no longer just a management interface. Provisioning, protection, and the overall availability of the environment rely on vCenter Server availabilty.

To recover the vCenter Server components in the event of an outage that results in data loss or data corruption, it is necessary to make backups of the databases and the vCenter Server configurations. The PSC and vCenter Server each have specific configuration information that should be backed up.

The frequency of backups depends on the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) that has been defined for the management environment. The time to recover the vCenter Server, or the Recovery Time Objective (RTO), is also a critical piece of designing a vCenter backup strategy. The RPO defines the maximum period of data loss that can be tolerated as a result of an outage.

If the RPO has been determined to be four hours, this means that backups should occur at least every four hours. The RTO determines how quickly the vCenter must be available after an outage.