Author: Banu Sundhar, NetApp

Virtual machines in the OpenShift Virtualization environment are containerized applications that run in the worker nodes of your OpenShift Container platform. It is important to protect the VM metadata as well as the persistent disks of the VMs, so that when they are lost or corrupted, you can recover them.

The persistent disks of the OpenShift Virtualization VMs can be backed by ONTAP storage integrated to the OpenShift Cluster using Trident CSI. In this section we use OpenShift API for Data Protection (OADP) to perform backup of VMs including its data volumes to

We then restore from the backup when needed.

OADP enables backup, restore, and disaster recovery of applications on an OpenShift cluster. Data that can be protected with OADP include Kubernetes resource objects, persistent volumes, and internal images.

Red Hat OpenShift has leveraged the solutions developed by the OpenSource communities for data protection. Velero is an open-source tool to safely backup and restore, perform disaster recovery, and migrate Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes. To use Velero easily, OpenShift has developed the OADP operator and the Velero plugin to integrate with the CSI storage drivers. The core of the OADP APIs that are exposed are based on the Velero APIs. After installing the OADP operator and configuring it, the backup/restore operations that can be performed are based on the operations exposed by the Velero API.

OADP 1.3 is available from the operator hub of OpenShift cluster 4.12 and later. It has a built-in Data Mover that can move CSI volume snapshots to a remote object store. This provides portability and durability by moving snapshots to an object storage location during backup. The snapshots are then available for restoration after disasters.

The following are the versions of the various components used for the examples in this section

Trident CSI
OpenShift API for Data Protection (OADP)
Velero