I am rarely using tweetdeck but today I did and I am glad I did. I saw William Lam’s tweet about how one of the engineers showed him how to snapshot a state of the physical ESX(i) host so any changes can be restored.

Now if it was a nested ESX(i) host (a vm as a esxi host) you could simply snapshot it. But this is how you do it for a physical ESX(i) host – possibly in your lab.

“It turns out you could “snapshot” a physical or even virtual ESXi host by just backing up the state.tgz file and then restoring it. As the name suggest, the state.tgz file contains all the configurations of your ESXi host. The process is pretty straight forward:

1. SCP /bootbank/state.tgz and back that up to your local system or shared storage
2. Perform your tests or make changes to the system
3. When you are ready to restore, copy the state.tgz back into /bootbank folder
4. Login to ESXi Shell and run reboot -f which will ensure no changes are saved to our state.tgz

Once the ESXi host reboots, it will use the restored state.tgz file and your system will be back at its original state. This process is actually not new, ESXi already provides a way to backup/restore “

Here is the original post.

Enjoy!