Generic Storage Backup and Restore

Warning

Generic Storage Backup must be used only in cases where migration to a CSI driver with snapshot support is not possible. For more details, refer to this page.

Applications can often be deployed using non-shared storage (e.g., local SSDs) or on systems where Veeam Kasten does not currently support the underlying storage provider. To protect data in these scenarios, Veeam Kasten with Kanister provides you with the ability to add functionality for backup, restore, and migration of application data with minimal modifications. This can be done in an efficient and transparent manner.

While a complete example is provided below, the only changes needed are the activation of Generic Storage Backup (GSB) on Veeam Kasten (see below), addition of a sidecar to your application deployment that can mount the application data volume, and an annotation that requests GSB.

Activating Generic Storage Backup

By default, the GSB feature is disabled. It can be activated by providing an activation token when installing Veeam Kasten via the Helm chart.

Existing customers can contact Kasten by Veeam Support via MyVeeam, to open a support case and request the activation token for GSB.

For all current prospects evaluating Veeam Kasten, we recommend reaching out to your local Kasten by Veeam Sales team through the local point of contact within the Veeam channel.

Provide the cluster ID (UUID of the default namespace) when requesting an activation token. This ID will help Veeam Kasten identify a cluster where GSB is activated. Use the following kubectl command to get the UUID:

# Extract UUID of the `default` namespace
$ kubectl get namespace default -o jsonpath="{.metadata.uid}{'\n'}"

Once the token is obtained, provide it to Veeam Kasten with the following Helm option:

--set genericStorageBackup.token=<activation token for the cluster>

Note

A separate activation token is required for every cluster where you want to activate GSB.

Using Sidecars

The sidecar can be added either by leveraging Veeam Kasten's sidecar injection feature or by manually patching the resource as described below.

Enabling Kanister Sidecar Injection

Veeam Kasten implements a Mutating Webhook Server which mutates workload objects by injecting a Kanister sidecar into the workload when the workload is created. The Mutating Webhook Server also adds the k10.kasten.io/forcegenericbackup annotation to the targeted workloads to enforce generic backup. By default, the sidecar injection feature is disabled. To enable this feature, the following options need to be used when installing Veeam Kasten via the Helm chart:

--set injectKanisterSidecar.enabled=true

Once enabled, Kanister sidecar injection will be enabled for all workloads in all namespaces. To perform sidecar injections on workloads only in specific namespaces, the namespaceSelector labels can be set using the following option:

--set-string injectKanisterSidecar.namespaceSelector.matchLabels.key=value

By setting namespaceSelector labels, the Kanister sidecar will be injected only in the workloads which will be created in the namespace matching labels with namespaceSelector labels.

Similarly, to inject the sidecar for only specific workloads, the objectSelector option can be set as shown below:

--set-string injectKanisterSidecar.objectSelector.matchLabels.key=value

Warning

It is recommended to add at least one namespaceSelector or objectSelector when enabling the injectKanisterSidecar feature. Otherwise, Veeam Kasten will try to inject a sidecar into every new workload. In the common case, this will lead to undesirable results and potential performance issues.

For example, to inject sidecars into workloads that match the label component: db and are in namespaces that are labeled with k10/injectKanisterSidecar: true, the following options should be added to the Veeam Kasten Helm install command:

--set injectKanisterSidecar.enabled=true \
--set-string injectKanisterSidecar.objectSelector.matchLabels.component=db \
--set-string injectKanisterSidecar.namespaceSelector.matchLabels.k10/injectKanisterSidecar=true

The labels set with namespaceSelector and objectSelector are mutually inclusive. This means that if both the options are set to perform sidecar injection, the workloads should have labels matching the objectSelector labels AND they have to be created in the namespace with labels that match the namespaceSelector labels. Similarly, if multiple labels are specified for either namespaceSelector or objectSelector, they will all needed to match for a sidecar injection to occur.

For the sidecar to choose a security context that can read data from the volume, Veeam Kasten performs the following checks in order:

If there are multiple primary containers, the list of containers will be iterated over, and the SecurityContext of the containers will be merged so that the final SecurityContext is the most restrictive one. If there is only one primary container, the final SecurityContext of the sidecar will be the SecurityContext of the primary container.

If the workload PodSpec has a SecurityContext set, the sidecar does not need an explicit specification and will automatically use the context from the PodSpec.

If the above criteria are not met, by default, no SecurityContext will be set.

Note

The SecurityContext of the sidecar will have some additional "add" capabilities, and while selecting the most restrictive security context, some operations will be restricted. See this Veeam Kasten knowledge base article for more details.

Note

When the helm option for providing a Root CA to Veeam Kasten, i.e cacertconfigmap.name, is enabled, the Mutating Webhook will create a new ConfigMap, if it does not already exist, in the application namespace to provide the Root CA to the sidecar. This ConfigMap in the application namespace would be a copy of the Root CA ConfigMap residing in the Veeam Kasten namespace.

Note

Sidecar injection for standalone Pods is not currently supported. Refer to the following section to manually add the the Kanister sidecar to standalone Pods.

Updating the resource manifest

Alternatively, the Kanister sidecar can be added by updating the resource manifest with the Kanister sidecar. An example, where /data is used as an sample mount path, can be seen in the below specification. Note that the sidecar must be named kanister-sidecar and the sidecar image version should be pinned to the latest Kanister release.

     - name: kanister-sidecar
       image: gcr.io/kasten-images/kanister-tools:|kasten_version|
       command: ["bash", "-c"]
       args:
       - "tail -f /dev/null"
       volumeMounts:
       - name: data
         mountPath: /data

Alternatively, the below command can be run to add the sidecar into the workload. Make sure to specify correct values for the specified placeholders resource_type, namespace, resource_name, volume-name and volume-mount-path:

$ kubectl patch <resource_type> \
    -n <namespace> \
    <resource_name> \
    --type='json' \
    -p='[{"op": "add", "path": "/spec/template/spec/containers/0", "value": {"name": "kanister-sidecar", "image": "gcr.io/kasten-images/kanister-tools:<kasten_version>", "command": ["bash", "-c"], "args": ["tail -f /dev/null"], "volumeMounts": [{"name": "<volume-name>", "mountPath": "<volume-mount-path>"}] } }]'

Note

After injecting the sidecar manually, workload pods will be recreated. If the deployment strategy used for the workload is RollingUpdate, the workload should be scaled down and scaled up so that the volumes are mounted into the newly created pods.

Once the above changes are made, Veeam Kasten will be able to automatically extract data and, using its data engine, efficiently deduplicate data and transfer it into an object store or NFS file store.

If you have multiple volumes used by your pod, you simply need to mount them all within this sidecar container. There is no naming requirement on the mount path as long as they are unique.

Note that a backup operation can take up to 800 MB of memory for some larger workloads. To ensure the pod containing the kanister-sidecar is scheduled on a node with sufficient memory for a particularly intensive workload, you can add a resource request to the container definition.

resources:
  requests:
    memory: 800Mi

Generic Backup Annotation

Generic backups can be requested by adding the k10.kasten.io/forcegenericbackup annotation to the workload as shown in the example below.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: demo-app
  labels:
    app: demo
annotations:
  k10.kasten.io/forcegenericbackup: "true"

The following is a kubectl example to add the annotation to a running deployment:

# Add annotation to force generic backups
$ kubectl annotate deployment <deployment-name> k10.kasten.io/forcegenericbackup="true" --namespace=<namespace-name>

Finally, note that the Kanister sidecar and Location profile must both be present for generic backups to work.

Required Capabilities for Generic Storage Backup

OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) introduced more restrictive default security context constraints (SCCs) in the 4.11 release - Pod Security Admission. The change affects the ability to perform rootless Generic Storage Backup. Since K10 5.5.8 rootless is a default behavior for Veeam Kasten.

To use Generic Storage Backup with OCP 4.11 and above, the following capabilities must be allowed:

FOWNER

CHOWN

DAC_OVERRIDE

Even if Veeam Kasten is installed on Kubernetes distributions other than OCP, the capabilities mentioned above are required for ensuring the proper functionality of Generic Storage Backup.

Previous version of restricted SCC can be used as a template. Change the allowedCapabilities field as follows:

allowedCapabilities:
- CHOWN
- DAC_OVERRIDE
- FOWNER

End-to-End Example

The below section provides a complete end-to-end example of how to extend your application to support generic backup and restore. A dummy application is used below but it should be straightforward to extend this example.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have obtained the activation token and have Veeam Kasten installed by providing the token using the genericStorageBackup.token option.
Make sure you have installed Veeam Kasten with injectKanisterSidecar enabled.
(Optional) namespaceSelector labels are set for injectKanisterSidecar.

injectKanisterSidecar can be enabled by passing the following flags while installing Veeam Kasten helm chart

...
          --set injectKanisterSidecar.enabled=true \
          --set-string injectKanisterSidecar.namespaceSelector.matchLabels.k10/injectKanisterSidecar=true # Optional

Deploy the application

The following specification contains a complete example of how to exercise generic backup and restore functionality. It consists of a an application Deployment that use a Persistent Volume Claim (mounted internally at /data) for storing data.

Saving the below specification as a file, deployment.yaml, is recommended for reuse later.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: demo-pvc
  labels:
    app: demo
    pvc: demo
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 1Gi
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: demo-app
  labels:
    app: demo
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: demo
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: demo
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: demo-container
        image: alpine:3.7
        resources:
            requests:
              memory: 256Mi
              cpu: 100m
        command: ["tail"]
        args: ["-f", "/dev/null"]
        volumeMounts:
        - name: data
          mountPath: /data
      volumes:
      - name: data
        persistentVolumeClaim:
          claimName: demo-pvc

Create a namespace:
```
$ kubectl create namespace <namespace>
```
If injectKanisterSidecar.namespaceSelector labels are set while installing Veeam Kasten, add the labels to namespace to match with namespaceSelector
```
$ kubectl label namespace <namespace> k10/injectKanisterSidecar=true
```

Deploy the above application as follows:

# Deploying in a specific namespace
$ kubectl apply --namespace=<namespace> -f deployment.yaml

Check status of deployed application:

List pods in the namespace. The demo-app pods can be seen created with two containers.

# List pods
$ kubectl get pods --namespace=<namespace> | grep demo-app
# demo-app-56667f58dc-pbqqb   2/2     Running   0          24s

Describe the pod and verify the kanister-sidecar container is injected with the same volumeMounts.
```
volumeMounts:
- name: data
  mountPath: /data
```

Create a Location Profile

If you haven't done so already, create a Location profile with the appropriate Location and Credentials information from the Veeam Kasten settings page. Instructions for creating location profiles can be found here

Warning

Generic storage backup and restore workflows are not compatible with immutable backups location profiles. Immutable backups enabled location profiles can be used with these workflows, but will be treated as a non-immutability-enabled profile: the protection period will be ignored, and no point-in-time restore functionality will be provided. Please note that use of an object-locking bucket for such cases can amplify storage usage without any additional benefit.

Insert Data

The easiest way to insert data into the demo application is to simply copy it in:

# Get pods for the demo application from its namespace
$ kubectl get pods --namespace=<namespace> | grep demo-app

# Copy required data manually into the pod
$ kubectl cp <file-name> <namespace>/<pod>:/data/

# Verify if the data was copied successfully
$ kubectl exec --namespace=<namespace> <pod> -- ls -l /data

Backup Data

Backup the application data either by creating a Policy or running a Manual Backup from Veeam Kasten. This assumes that the application is running on a system where Veeam kasten does not support the provisioned disks (e.g., local storage). Make sure to specify the location profile in the advanced settings for the policy. This is required to perform Kanister operations.

This policy covers an application running in the namespace sampleApp.

apiVersion: config.kio.kasten.io/v1alpha1
kind: Policy
metadata:
  name: sample-custom-backup-policy
  namespace: kasten-io
spec:
  comment: My sample custom backup policy
  frequency: '@daily'
  subFrequency:
    minutes: [30]
    hours: [22,7]
    weekdays: [5]
    days: [15]
  retention:
    daily: 14
    weekly: 4
    monthly: 6
  actions:
  - action: backup
    backupParameters:
      profile:
        name: my-profile
        namespace: kasten-io
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      k10.kasten.io/appNamespace: sampleApp

For complete documentation of the Policy CR, refer to Policy API Type.

Destroy Data

To destroy the data manually, run the following command:

# Using kubectl
$ kubectl exec --namespace=<namespace> <pod> -- rm -rf /data/<file-name>

Alternatively, the application and the PVC can be deleted and recreated.

Restore Data

Restore the data using Veeam Kasten by selecting the appropriate restore point.

Verify Data

After restore, you should verify that the data is intact. One way to verify this is to use MD5 checksum tool.

# MD5 on the original file copied
$ md5 <file-name>

# Copy the restored data back to local env
$ kubectl get pods --namespace=<namespace> | grep demo-app
$ kubectl cp <namespace>/<pod>:/data/<filename> <new-filename>

# MD5 on the new file
$ md5 <new-filename>

The MD5 checksums should match.

Generic Storage Backup and Restore on Unmounted PVCs

Generic Storage Backup and Restore on unmounted PVCs can be enabled by adding k10.kasten.io/forcegenericbackup annotation to the StorageClass with which the volumes have been provisioned.