Protect your SUSE Rancher managed RKE downstream Kubernetes workloads with Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager
Mon, 19 Sep 2022 13:46:53 -0000
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Protect your SUSE Rancher managed RKE downstream Kubernetes workloads with Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Managere
We have been continuously working to extend the level of support for Kubernetes with Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager, to protect Kubernetes workloads on different platforms.
With this continued services path, we now protect SUSE Rancher managed Kubernetes workloads with PowerProtect Data Manager by taking advantage of a partnership with SUSE Rancher.
Kubernetes cluster and containers have become a popular option for deploying enterprise applications in the cloud and in on-premise environments. SUSE Rancher is a Kubernetes management platform that simplifies cluster installation and operations, whether they are on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge, giving the freedom to build and run containerized applications. PowerProtect Data Manager protects SUSE Rancher managed Kubernetes workloads and ensures high availability and consistent, reliable backup and restore for Kubernetes workloads during normal operations or during a disaster recovery situation.
Protect SUSE Rancher managed Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) downstream workloads with PowerProtect Data Manager
PowerProtect Data Manager enables customers to protect, manage, and recover data for on-premises, virtualized, or cloud deployments. Using PowerProtect Data Manager, customers can discover, protect, and restore workloads in a SUSE Rancher managed Kubernetes environment to ensure that the data is easy to backup and restore.
PowerProtect Data Manager enhances the protection by sending the data directly to the Dell EMC PowerProtect DD series appliance to gain benefits from unmatched efficiency, deduplication, performance, and scalability. See the solution brief and this technical white paper for more details.
About SUSE Rancher and RKE
SUSE Rancher is an enterprise computing platform for running Kubernetes for on-premises, cloud, and edge environments. With Rancher, you can form your own Kubernetes-as-a-Service. You can create, upgrade, and manage Kubernetes clusters. Rancher can set up clusters by itself or work with a hosted Kubernetes provider. It addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters anywhere. SUSE Rancher also provides IT operators and development teams with integrated tools for building, deploying, and running cloud-native workloads.
SUSE Rancher supports the management of CNCF-Certified Kubernetes distributions, such as Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE). RKE is a certified Kubernetes distribution for both bare-metal and virtualized servers.
Protecting data by integrating SUSE Rancher managed RKE downstream Kubernetes clusters with PowerProtect Data Manager
You can integrate PowerProtect Data Manager with SUSE Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters through Kubernetes APIs to discover namespaces and associated persistent resources PersistentVolumeClaims (PVCs). PowerProtect Data Manager discovers the Kubernetes clusters using the IP address or fully qualified domain name (FQDN). PowerProtect Data Manager uses the discovery service account and the token kubeconfig file to integrate with kube-apiserver.
PowerProtect Data Manager integrates with SUSE Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters for data protection in the following ways:
- Directly connecting to the RKE downstream single node with controlplane and etcd roles.
- Through an external load balancer, when there are multiple RKE nodes for high availability with controlplane and etcd roles in an RKE downstream cluster.
SUSE Rancher managed RKE downstream Kubernetes clusters integration with PowerProtect Data Manager
Adding the RKE downstream Kubernetes cluster with PowerProtect Data Manager as an asset source
Once the Kubernetes cluster is added as an asset source in PowerProtect Data Manager and the discovery is complete, the associated namespaces are available as assets for protection. PowerProtect Data Manager protects the following two types of Kubernetes cluster assets - Namespaces and PVCs. Note that PPDM also protects the associated meta data for namespaces and cluster resources that include secrets, ConfigMaps, custom resources, RoleBindings, and so on.
During the discovery process, PowerProtect Data Manager creates the following namespaces in the cluster:
• Velero-ppdm: This namespace contains a Velero pod to back up metadata and stage to target storage in bare-metal environments. It performs PVC snapshot and metadata backup for VMware cloud native storage.
• PowerProtect: This namespace contains a PowerProtect controller pod to drive persistent volume claim snapshot and backup and to send the backups to the target storage using dynamically deployed cProxy pods.
Kubernetes uses persistent volumes to store persisted application data. Persistent volumes are created on external storage and then attached to a particular pod using PVCs. PVCs are included along with other namespaces in PowerProtect Data Manager backup and recovery operations. Dell EMC PowerStore, PowerMax, XtremIO, and PowerFlex storage platforms all come with CSI plugins to support containerized workloads running on Kubernetes.
With this easy integration for data protection with PowerProtect Data Manager, Dell Technologies empowers Kubernetes admins to perform backup/recovery operations and ensure SUSE Rancher managed Kubernetes cluster workloads are available, consistent, durable, and recoverable.
For more details, see the white paper SUSE Rancher and RKE Kubernetes cluster using CSI Driver on DELL EMC PowerFlex about how to protect the SUSE Rancher managed Kubernetes workloads with PowerProtect Data Manager.