ESXi is doing backups on its own every hour into either /bootbank/state.tgz or /altbootbank/state.tgz (whichever partition is currently used). This file state.tgz is what is actually inside the configBundle-hostname.tgz file, so it’s the same thing. So if a backup not older than 1 hour is good enough for you you don’t need to invoke any backup command at all, just copy out the state.tgz file. If you do want to pull the current backup then simply run “vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/sync_config” first.

Trigger a backup:

ssh root@humle "vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/sync_config"

Copy the file locally:

scp root@humle:/altbootbank/state.tgz ./humle-state.tgz