NSX Backups failing “HTTP request time out”

“Server failed to respond. HTTP request time out.”

I’ve been seeing this more frequently and thought I’d post something about how to fix this error that may happen when you click on the “Backup & Restore” button on the home page of NSX. It can affect the list of backups from loading and the backup jobs from running altogether. As you can see below NSX failed to load all of the backups in the history:

I have seen in the past a limit of 100 backups listed in history before performance of NSX listing those can be affected. I will try to link official documentation as soon as I find it.

I went and checked how many backups I had and found….. 830!! Just slightly over the (assumed) recommended amount of 100…

[root@ifitisnotbroken-file1 NSX1]# ls -lath | wc -l
830
[root@ifitisnotbroken-file1 NSX1]#

To clean this up, I ran the following command which was take from here:

find /ifitisnotbrokenbackups/NSX/NSX1-* -mtime +20 -exec rm {} \;

It finds any file that is over 20 days old(the +20 part) and will remove them. After I ran that command I had 82 files left:

[root@ifitisnotbroken-file1 NSX1]# ls -lath | wc -l
82
[root@ifitisnotbroken-file1 NSX1]#

I wanted to lower the number of files/backups so I didn’t have to do the cleanup process as often. I ran the above command but changed the days to 10 and I was left with 43 files. I refreshed the backup page in NSX and it took less than 17 seconds to load and my backups started working without issue:

Hope this helps and please let me know if you have any questions!