Getting started with VCF Part 12 – NSX Manager Backups

I kept seeing an orange banner when I log into my SDDC Manager displaying a warning about my NSX Manager being backed up to the SDDC  appliance rather than an external SFTP server. You may have spotted it in previous posts on VCF 3.9 already. I therefore decided to configure the NSX backups to use an external destination. The steps are very straight-forward but there are a few nuances which I will call out in this post. First, here is the warning (not sure if it is readable, but it is essentially telling you that backing up NSX Manager to…

Getting started with Velero 1.0.0-rc.1

Last week, the Velero team announced the availability of release candidate (RC) version 1.0.0. I was eager to get my hands on it and try it out. Since it is RC (and not GA), I thought I would just deploy a fresh environment for testing.  The guidance from the Velero team is to test it out in your non-critical environments! On a number of Velero github sites, the links to download the binaries do not appear to be working, plus some of the install guidance is a little sparse. Anyhow, after some trial and error, I decided it might be…

Portworx, STORK and container volume snapshots

As I continue on my cloud native storage journey, I found myself looking at Portworx. The reason for this was down to the fact that Portworx provide a plugin for the Heptio Velero product, and I was interested to see how this behaved on top of my vSphere on-premises infrastructure. I’ve written about Velero a few times already, and done a few posts where I leveraged the Restic plugin for snapshot functionality. Thus, I wanted to see how Portworx achieved the same thing, and wanted to learn about bit more about STORK, Portworx’s Storage Orchestrator for Kubernetes. I’ve written about…

More Velero – Cassandra backup and restore

In my previous exercise with Heptio Velero, I looked at backing up and restoring a Couchbase deployment. This time I turned my attention to another popular containerized application, Cassandra. Cassandra is a NoSQL database, similar in some respects to Couchbase. Once again, I will be deploying Cassandra as a set of containers and persistent volumes from Kubernetes running on top of PKS, the Pivotal Container Service. And again, just like my last exercise, I will be instantiating the Persistent Volumes as virtual disks on top of vSAN. I’ll show you how to get Cassandra up and running quickly by sharing…

A first look at Velero (previously known as Ark)

Those of you who work in the cloud native space will probably be aware of VMware’s acquisition of Heptio back in December 2018. Heptio bring much expertise and a number of products to the table, one of which I was very eager to try it. This is the Heptio Velero product, previously known as Heptio Ark. Heptio Velero provides a means to back up and restore cloud native applications. Interestingly enough, they appear to be able to capture all of the deployment details, so they are able to backup the pods (compute), persistent volumes (storage) and services (networking), as well…

A closer look at Rubrik Cloud Data Management v3.1

When I started to write this post, I looked back over my notes from previous conversations with the team at Rubrik and realized that my first conversation with them was almost 2 years ago. How time flies! I still remember meeting Rubrik at one of our VMware Partner Exchanges (PEX) in 2015, and getting a demo from Bipul Sinha (Rubrik CEO) and Julia Lee (Product Marketing). I also remember when Chris Wahl moved to Rubrik (almost 18 months ago now), thinking what a great move that was for both Chris and Rubrik. Well, when I caught up with Chris last…

A quick introduction to Rubrik

I first encountered Rubrik at this year’s Partner Exchange (PEX) 2015 in San Francisco. They had some promotional flyers made up labeled “Backup Still Sucks”. I guess a lot of people can relate to that. I had a chat with Julia Lee, who used to be a storage product marketing manager here at VMware, but recently moved to Rubrik. Rubrik’s pitch is that customers are currently stitching together backup software with backup storage in order to backup their virtual infrastructures – there is no seamless integration. Rubrik’s primary aim is backup simplicity – they want to provide a “time machine”…