vCenter server filebased backups are failing for the SFTP protocol.

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Precisely the backups are failing for the SFTP and works for the other protocol. The backups are failing at 0% as soon as we start the backup.

Environment

vCenter server 7.x 

vCenter server 8.x

Cause

The SFTP backups is configured is offer only the key based authentication, hence vCenter keeps trying the authentication and it fails eventually in the initial communication as the authentication is never established. 

 

Resolution

The SFTP backup config file has to be changed to offer only the password based authentication and not key based, if that's the only option we can manually configure the key based authentication on the vCenter server. 

 

Additional Information