OpenShift Covered Under the Shield of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager
Wed, 24 Apr 2024 11:22:35 -0000
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About a decade ago, no one thought there could be hassle free deployment and management of applications without worrying about the OS and infrastructure. When I first started using containerization, I was a little surprised and relaxed because I didn’t need to worry about whether my code/application would run on a different platform/machine or not.
Container technologies are widely being accepted and used owing to application modernization and DevOps. Kubernetes is an open-source container management platform that unifies a cluster of machines into a single pool of compute resources. OpenShift is a PaaS platform that is built on top of Kubernetes and automates the development to deployment workflow for an application.
There has also been a continued emphasis on distributed data intensive applications that leverage both traditional relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) databases for data persistence. Databases deployed on OpenShift can be used in conjunction with both Container Storage Interface (CSI) and VMware Cloud Native Storage variants. With containers deployed in distributed environments, it becomes more important to protect these workloads and to ensure availability in case of a disaster recovery situation. Here comes Dell PowerProtect Data Manager to the rescue.
PowerProtect Data Manager! Saving the day!
PowerProtect Data Manager ensures that data is easy to back up and restore, and remains available, consistent, and durable in a Kubernetes workload. PowerProtect DD Series appliances are the preferred target for PowerProtect Data Manager, which brings the benefit of deduplication, performance, efficiency, and security. PowerProtect Data Manager provides a centralized management UI where protection policies can be defined to manage clusters, namespaces, and other OpenShift components.
Protecting OpenShift workloads with PowerProtect Data Manager
OpenShift adds several additional components on top of standard Kubernetes meta data components including Build, BuildConfig, ImageStream, ImageStreamTag, DeploymentConfig. These additional components allow a supporting source-to-image and image-to-deployment workflow that takes an existing source code repository and converts an associated container to Docker images. These components are required to be protected when restoring OpenShift namespaces.
An OpenShift Kubernetes cluster can be registered with PowerProtect Data Manager by adding the details of the cluster in the PowerProtect Data Manager portal. Once you add the cluster, associated namespaces are available to be protected. Policies can be created to schedule and run the backup and you can also replicate and restore the protected assets.
Figure 1. Adding OpenShift Kubernetes cluster as an asset source
The powerprotect and velero-ppdm namespaces are created automatically once the cluster is integrated with PowerProtect Data Manager. During the discovery process, when OpenShift cluster is detected in PowerProtect Data Manager, the OpenShift Application Data Protection (OADP) operator is automatically installed, which further deploys velero and required plugins. During backups and restores, the OpenShift plugin will be leveraged to back up the associated OpenShift components. This process is transparent to the user in terms of policy creation and during restores.
Figure 2. PowerProtect Data Manager Controller with OADP
PowerProtect Controller is the component that is installed on the Kubernetes cluster when PowerProtect Data Manager discovers the cluster. The backup and restore controllers manage BackupJob Custom Resource (CR) and RestoreJob CR definitions and are responsible for the backup and restore of Persistent Volumes.
The stateless containerized proxy (cProxy) gets installed on Kubernetes cluster when the backup and restore process initiates and gets deleted when those processes are completed. It is responsible for managing Persistent Volume snapshots (snap copies) and mounting snapshots and for moving the data to the target storage. It is also responsible for restoring data into Persistent Volumes from target storage and making the data available for attaching to Pods. It also acts as an agent plug-in orchestrator for application aware backups.
PowerProtect Data Manager can easily integrate with OpenShift Kubernetes cluster, ensuring that data on the cluster is easy to back up and restore, always available, consistent, and durable.
For more details on how to protect OpenShift Kubernetes cluster, see the white paper PowerProtect Data Manager Protecting OpenShift Workloads.
Author: Charu