VMware Inventory

The VMware inventory lets Plakar Control Plane connect to a VMware environment, such as a vCenter Server or a vSphere-based cloud platform like OVHcloud, and discover supported resources.

Once connected, the discovered resources become available for management directly from Plakar Control Plane.

VMware inventories authenticate using a username and password for an account that has access to the VMware environment.

When creating a VMware inventory, provide the following information:

• Name: a name for the inventory.
• Server: the VMware server address, for example xxx.ovh.com for OVHcloud Hosted Private Cloud environments.
• Username: a user account with permission to access the VMware server.
• Password
• Root CA Certificate (optional): the root CA certificate used to verify the server’s TLS certificate.
• Skip TLS verification (optional): disables certificate validation, allowing connections to servers using self-signed or otherwise untrusted certificates.

The Server, Username, Password, and Root CA Certificate fields can either be entered directly or retrieved from a configured secret provider by clicking Use secret provider.

Before Plakar Control Plane can connect to a VMware environment, the public IP address of the Plakar Control Plane instance must be allowed by the VMware platform.

The exact procedure depends on your provider. For example, in an OVHcloud Hosted Private Cloud environment, add the Plakar Control Plane IP address to the vCenter allow list by navigating to:

Hosted Private Cloud → Managed VMware vSphere → Your vSphere Instance → Security

If you’re using another VMware provider or a self-managed vCenter deployment, consult your platform’s documentation for the equivalent allow-list or firewall configuration.

Without allowing the Plakar Control Plane IP address, connection attempts to the VMware server will fail even if the authentication credentials are correct.

When creating a new VMware inventory, provide the inventory name, server, username, password, and optionally a root CA certificate or enable Skip TLS verification.

After creating the inventory, trigger a synchronization to discover and load compute instances from the configured VMware environment. You can run synchronization again at any time to refresh the inventory, for example after creating new instances.

All configuration details provided during inventory creation can be updated later by clicking the settings icon in the top right of the inventory page, which opens a settings popup.

Resources in a VMware inventory are automatically discovered and synchronized. They are managed by the inventory and cannot be manually created or deleted from Plakar Control Plane.

You can expand a resource row to view its details. Each row expands to show three tabs:

• Apps: lists latest 5 restore points available for this resource, apps associated with the resource and and option to assign a new app to the resource. See the apps documentation on how to set them up on resources.
• Settings: configure the resource, including backup coverage

Backup coverage tracks how many of your resources are protected by backups. If a resource does not need to be backed up, for example a test instance, you can exclude it from coverage using the Exclude from backup coverage option in the Settings tab. Excluded resources are omitted from protection status and coverage reporting.