Open Source Velero Plugin for vSphere (using snapshots) in action

I recently published an article around Velero and vSAN File Services, showing how Velero and the restic plugin could be used to backup and restore Kubernetes application that used vSAN File Services. Today, I want to turn my attention to a very cool new plugin that we announced in mid-April, namely the Velero Plugin for vSphere. This open source plugin enables Velero to take a crash-consistent VADP* snapshot backup of a block Persistent Volume on vSphere storage, and store the backup on S3 compatible storage. * VADP is short for VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection. To utilize the…

Using Velero to backup and restore applications that use vSAN File Service RWX file shares

It has been a while since I looked at Velero, our backup and restore product for Kubernetes cluster resources. This morning I noticed that the Velero team just published version 1.4. This article uses the previous version of Velero, version is v1.3.2. The version should not make a difference to the article. In this post, I want to see Velero backing up and restoring applications that use read-write-many (RWX) volumes that are dynamically provisioned as file shares from vSAN 7.0 File Services. To demonstrate, I’ll create two simple busybox Pods in their own namespace. Using the vSphere CSI driver, Kubernetes…

Setting up Velero 1.0.0 to backup K8s on vSphere/PKS

I have written about Velero a few times on this blog, but I haven’t actually looked at how you would deploy the 1.0.0 version, even though it has been available since May 2019. Someone recently reached out to me for some guidance on how to deploy it, as there are a few subtle differences between previous versions. Therefore I decided to document step-by-step how to do it, but focusing on when your Kubernetes cluster is running on vSphere. I also highlight a gotcha when using Velero to backup applications that are running on Kubernetes deployed via Enterprise PKS, Pivotal Container…

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…