Using Tanzu Mission Control Data Protection with on-premises S3 (MinIO)

Today, we will look at another feature of Tanzu Mission Control: Data Protection. In an earlier post, we saw how Tanzu Mission Control, or TMC for short, can be used to manage and create clusters on vSphere that have Identity Management integrated with LDAP/Active Directory. We also saw how TMC managed Tanzu Kubernetes clusters on vSphere utilized the NSX ALB for Load Balancing services in that same post. Now we will deploy an S3 Object Store from MinIO to an on-premises Tanzu Kubernetes cluster. This will then become the “backup target” for TMC Data Protection. TMC Data Protection uses the…

Task “Delete a virtual storage object” reports “A specified parameter was not correct”

I’ve recently been looking at the vSphere Velero Plugin, and how the latest version of the plugin enables administrators to backup and restore vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor cluster objects as well as Tanzu Kubernetes “guest” cluster objects. This plugin utilizes vSphere snapshot technology, so that a Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV) backed by a First Class Disk (FCD) in vSphere can be snapshot, and the snapshot is then moved by a Data Manager appliance to an S3 object store bucket. Once the data movement operation has completed, the snapshot is removed from the PV/FCD. During the testing of this new functionality,…

Velero vSphere Operator backup/restore TKG “guest” cluster objects in vSphere with Tanzu

Over the past week or so, I have posted a number of blogs on how to get started with the new Velero vSphere Operator. I showed how to deploy the Operator in the Supervisor Cluster of vSphere with Tanzu, and also how to install the Velero and Backupdriver components in the Supervisor. We then went on to take backups and do restores of both stateless (e.g. Nginx deployment) and stateful (e.g. Cassandra StatefulSet) which were running as PodVMs is a Supervisor cluster. In the latter post, we saw how the new Velero Data Manager acted as the interface between Velero,…

vSphere with Tanzu stateful application backup/restore using Velero vSphere Operator

Recently I wrote about our new Velero vSphere Operator. This new functionality, launched with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.2, enables administrators to backup and restore objects in their vSphere with Tanzu namespaces. In my previous post, I showed how we could use the Velero vSphere Operator to backup and restore a stateless application (the example used was an Nginx deployment) to and from an S3 Object Store bucket. The S3 object store and bucket was provided by the Minio Operator that is also available in VCF 4.2 as part of the vSAN Data Persistent platform (DPp) offering. In this post,…

vSphere with Tanzu backup/restore with Velero vSphere Operator

Last week, I posted about the vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp), a feature that is now available with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.2. In that article, I went through the setup of the Minio Operator in vSphere with Tanzu, and then we created a Minio Tenant with its own S3 Object Store. In other words, we were able to assign an on-premises S3 Object Store to a vSphere with Tanzu namespace in just a few clicks, which was pretty cool. Now, one of the other Supervisor services that is available with VCF 4.2 is the Velero vSphere Operator. Many of…

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…