I am back after learning how to Fly
Hi Everyone,
We are back to the Kasten A to Z series. There was a delay due to a short vacation and my hitting a pothole on my bike and learning how to fly. Well my flight lasted about as long lived as my first ever pod on a Kubernetes cluster and ended with a massive crash minus the loop. My write hand can now type again so off I go.
Snapshots are not Backups !
There is a famous saying “Snapshots are not backups” and this applies to Kasten as well. While we can do local snapshots on the cluster these have only limited value. If you lose the cluster you lose the snapshots.
Location Profiles and Exports
Kasten allows us to export local snapshot to Location profiles. These can be on local S3 or NFS or Cloud instance. If you are leveraging the Vsphere-csi-driver then you can even export the data portion of your snapshots to a Veeam Repository. Keep in mind that in the latter case you would still need to leverage one of the other types of location profiles for you metadata. Kasten leverages the opens source took Kopia to perform these exports. As the Veeam Kasten documentation states “Veeam Kasten uses Kopia as a data mover which implicitly provides support to deduplicate, encrypt and compress data at rest”
Here is a screenshot showing the location profile targets that are currently supported:
Adding A Location Profile in Kasten.
Today I am going to add a location profile and then create a backup policy that also exports the snapshot to the location.
I have already created a bucket on Wasabi offsite and will leverage it for the location profile.
IMMUTABLE!
I am hooking Kasten up to an immutable bucket that I created. As AI generated text would state “in an ever changing world….” use immutable or face the consequences!
Kasten has certain immutability requirements, one being that the bucket must have 21 days immutability set beforehand.
Bucket Validation in Kasten
Kasten will not allow you to add a bucket if it does not comply with its prerequisites:
Exporting Snapshots to the Location Profile
I am going to add the new location to two backup policies. First I will Link my Kasten Disaster Recovery Policy, then I will add the location profile to my existing nginx policy.
Now to Run a Real Backup
Exports Successful
Conclusion
Local snapshots cannot be considered backups. Kasten allows you to export local snapshots to other locations via location profiles. These exported snapshots can also be used to test DR functionality and help us with application mobility. Those topics will be touched on in future posts in this series.
