Protecting an application with Veeam Kasten, usually accomplished by
creating a policy, requires the understanding and use of three concepts:
Snapshots and Backups: Depending on your environment and
requirement, you might need just one or both of these data capture
mechanisms
Scheduling: Specification of application capture frequency and
snapshot/backup retention objectives
Selection: This defines not just which applications are
protected by a policy but, whenever finer-grained control is needed,
resource filtering can be used to select what is captured on a
per-application basis
This section demonstrates how to use these concepts in the context of
a Veeam Kasten policy to protect applications. Today, an application for
Veeam Kasten is defined as a collection of namespaced Kubernetes
resources (e.g., ConfigMaps, Secrets), relevant non-namespaced resources
used by the application (e.g., StorageClasses), Kubernetes workloads (i.e.,
Deployments, StatefulSets, OpenShift DeploymentConfigs, and standalone
Pods), deployment
and release information available from Helm v3, and all persistent
storage resources (e.g., PersistentVolumeClaims and PersistentVolumes)
associated with the workloads.
While you can always create a policy from scratch from the policies
page, the easiest way to define policies for unprotected applications
is to click on the Applications card on the main dashboard. This will
take you to a page where you can see all applications in your
Kubernetes cluster.
To protect any unmanaged application, simply click CreatePolicy
and, as shown below, that will take you to the policy creation section
with an auto-populated policy name that you can change. The concepts
highlighted above will be described in the below sections in the
context of the policy creation workflow.
All policies center around the execution of actions and, for
protecting applications, you start by selecting the snapshot action
with an optional backup (currently called export) option to that
action.
A number of public cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google
Cloud) actually store snapshots in object storage and they are
retained independent of the lifecycle of the primary
volume. However, this is not true of all public clouds (e.g., IBM
Cloud) and you might also need to enable backups in public clouds
for safety. Please check with your cloud provider's documentation
for more information.
Snapshots are the basis of persistent data capture in Veeam Kasten.
They are usually used in the context of disk volumes (PVC/PVs) used
by the application but can also apply to application-level data capture
(e.g., with Kanister).
Snapshots, in most storage systems, are very efficient in terms of
having a very low performance impact on the primary workload,
requiring no downtime, supporting fast restore times, and implementing
incremental data capture.
However, storage snapshots usually also suffer from constraints such
as having relatively low limits on the maximum number of snapshots per
volume or per storage array. Most importantly, snapshots are not
always durable. First, catastrophic storage system failure will
destroy your snapshots along with your primary data. Further, in a
number of storage systems, a snapshot's lifecycle is tied to the
source volume. So, if the volume is deleted, all related snapshots
might automatically be garbage collected at the same time. It is
therefore highly recommended that you create backups of your
application snapshots too.
In most cases, when application-level capture mechanisms
(e.g., logical database dumps via Kanister) are
used, these artifacts are directly sent to an object store or an
NFS file store. Backups should not be needed in those scenarios unless
a mix of application and volume-level data is being captured or in case of
a more specific use case.
Given the limitations of snapshots, it is often advisable to set up
backups of your application stack. However, even if your snapshots are
durable, backups might still be useful in a variety of use cases
including lowering costs with Veeam Kasten's data deduplication or
backing your snapshots up in a different infrastructure provider for
cross-cloud resiliency.
Backup operations convert application and volume snapshots into
backups by transforming them into an infrastructure-independent format
and then storing
them in a target location.
To convert your snapshots into backups, select
EnableBackupsviaSnapshotExports during policy creation.
Additional settings for the destination location and
control over the export of snapshot data versus
just a reference will also be visible here. These are primarily used
for migrating applications across clusters and more information on them
can be found in the Exporting Applications
section. These settings are available when creating a policy, and when
manually exporting a restore point.
The data exported in a Backup operation consists of metadata on the
application and snapshot data for the application volumes.
The destination for the metadata export is an
Object Storage Location or
an NFS File Storage Location
that is specified in the ExportLocationProfile field.
Users without list permissions on profiles can manually enter the name of the
profile to export to if they have been given that information and
have permissions to create policies.
Warning
The exported data resulting from a Backup operation is organized into
storage repositories that are exclusively controlled and maintained
by Veeam Kasten. Independently using, interacting, connecting, modifying,
copying, upgrading, or in any way accessing/manipulating a Veeam Kasten
storage repository is unsupported and might cause data corruption/loss
to some or all of the restore points. Users must never attempt to
perform any such action themselves unless under constant, active
supervision by a member of Veeam support or engineering teams.
There are two mechanisms by which snapshot data get exported:
Filesystem Mode Export or
Block Mode Export.
Each mechanism defines the process of uploading, downloading,
and managing snapshot data in a specific destination location.
The export mechanism is normally selected automatically
on a per-volume basis, based on the Volume Mode used to mount
the volume in a Pod:
With automatic selection, both the metadata and the snapshot data are
sent to the same destination.
In a VMware vSphere environment,
there is an option to use the Block Mode Export
mechanism for all volume snapshots, regardless of the Volume Mode.
This option enables the specification of a
Veeam Repository Location
as the destination for snapshot data (only), along with a
separate location for the associated metadata.
The two export mechanisms are described below:
Filesystem Mode Export
This is the default mode of export for a volume mounted in
FilesystemVolume Mode.
Such volumes are attached via the volumeMounts
property of a Pod container specification.
A filesystem mode export assumes that the format of the data on
the application disk is a filesystem.
During upload, this export mechanism creates anotherPersistentVolume from the volume snapshot;
this is then mounted in a pod using filesystem
Volume Mode and the mounted filesystem is copied
with implicit support to deduplicate, compress and encrypt the data.
During download the target volume is mounted in a pod using filesystem
Volume Mode and the filesystem restored.
The destination for both snapshot data and metadata is the
Object Storage Location or
NFS File Storage Location that
is specified in the ExportLocationProfile field,
though the two types of data are stored separately.
Note
A volume normally exported in filesystem mode may be
exported in block mode if desired, provided its StorageClass
meets the requirements and is annotated as described in the
Block Mode Export section below.
To enable this behavior, it is necessary to request it on a per-volume basis
by setting one of the following annotations on its PersistentVolumeClaim:
When the annotation value is set to preferred, it gives priority
to block mode export but has the flexibility to switch to
filesystem mode export if that is not possible.
If the annotation value is set to force, an error will be
reported/raised if block mode cannot be used/executed.
Block Mode Export
This is the default mode of export for a volume mounted in
BlockVolume Mode.
Such volumes are attached via the volumeDevices
property of a Pod container specification.
A block mode export accesses the content of the disk snapshot
at the block level.
If changed block tracking (CBT) data is available for
the disk volume and is supported in Veeam Kasten for the
provisioner concerned, then Veeam Kasten will export just
the incremental changes to the export location if possible.
If an incremental upload is not possible then the entire
content of the volume snapshot will be uploaded each export.
Note
Filesystem PVCs are considered Block Mode PVCs if
specific flags indicating Generic Block Mode settings are
present, but only in cases where the application does not
have a Kanister blueprint with a Backup action. When a
blueprint exists, it supersedes all other configurations,
giving Kanister control over the backup process.
During the upload process, the export mechanism will use
storage provisioner specific network data transfer APIs
if available and supported by Veeam Kasten,
to directly fetch the volume snapshot data from the upload pod.
Alternatively, if these APIs are not available, the export
mechanism will create a PersistentVolume with the
volume snapshot data. This PersistentVolume is then mounted
in the upload pod using BlockVolume Mode, and the data will be read from the raw volume.
Similarly, during the download process, the mechanism will use
storage provisioner specific network data transfer APIs
if available and supported by Veeam Kasten,
to directly write the data to the target PersistentVolume.
Alternatively, if these APIs are not available, the target
PersistentVolume will be mounted in the
download pod using BlockVolume Mode and the data written to
the raw volume.
Note
Veeam Kasten will export snapshot data of a volume mounted with a
Block VolumeMode, or import/restore downloaded
block mode snapshot data to a
volume, only if the following annotation is present on
the volume's StorageClass:
An exception is made for snapshots of PersistentVolumes
provisioned by the csi.vsphere.vmware.com provisioner.
Volumes of this provisioner are already recognized internally
to support block mode exports and do not need this annotation
in their StorageClasses.
The presence of this annotation in a StorageClass
does not affect volumes of that StorageClass that
are mounted with the FilesystemVolume Mode
unless their PersistentVolumeClaims are annotated in the manner
described above to indicate
that the volume should be exported in block mode.
By default, Veeam Kasten uses provisioner-specific network data transfer
APIs for both block mode data upload and download, if available.
If there is a need for more precise control over the use of these APIs,
you can add one of the following annotations to a volume's StorageClass:
The default setting, if this annotation is not specified, is "enable".
However, it is important to note that the API is always used for the
csi.vsphere.vmware.com provisioner and the annotation will be
ignored if present.
When the Block Mode Export mechanism is used, the organization of
snapshot data in the destination location is based on the
type of location:
When the destination is an
Object Storage Location or an
NFS File Storage Location,
snapshot data will be uploaded in a Veeam Kasten specific format
which provides deduplication, compression and encryption support
in the specified destination.
Automatic compaction will be performed periodically on snapshot
data, to ensure
that the chain of incremental backups that follows a full
backup will not grow too long.
Compaction synthesizes a full backup
by applying the chain of incremental backups to the base full
backup and saving the result as a new full backup;
no block data is uploaded during compaction as
only references to data blocks are manipulated by the operation.
Metadata will also be sent to the same destination location,
though it is stored separately from the snapshot data.
A Veeam Repository Location
does not provide metadata storage, which must be specified separately
as described below.
In VMware vSphere environments it is
possible to optionally enable the use of the Block Mode Export
mechanism
for all of the volume snapshots of the applications affected by a
Backup Policy, regardless of Volume Mode, as it
is the preferred way to export snapshot data in a VMware cluster
with volumes provisioned by the csi.vsphere.vmware.com provisioner.
This setting is mandatory in order to specify a
Veeam Repository Location
profile as the destination for snapshot data.
Using the Block Mode Export mechanism for all
volume snapshots is enabled by explicitly
selecting the Exportsnapshotdatainblockmode
option in the export properties of the Backup Policy
and then selecting an
Object Storage Location, an
NFS File Storage or
a Veeam Repository Location
profile as the destination for snapshot data in the
LocationProfileSupportingBlockMode field.
The location for metadata is specified by the
ExportLocationProfile field, a
required field in the dialog.
When the LocationProfileSupportingBlockMode field is
an Object Storage Location or an
NFS File Storage Location, then
both values are required to be the same
to ensure that both metadata
and snapshot data are sent to the same location;
the policy will become invalid if this is not the case.
The values can be different only in the case of
a Veeam Repository Location
as it cannot be used for metadata storage.
The policy card provides an indication that the block
mode export mechanism is used for all exported snapshots
(see Exportsnapshotdatainblockmode... below):
If such an indication is not present then snapshot
data is exported with a mechanism based on the VolumeMode
of each individual volume.
In the particular case of migrating
snapshot data from a
Veeam Repository Location,
an identically named location profile as used as the export
block mode destination must exist in the importing cluster.
Actions can be set to execute at an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or
yearly granularity, or on demand. By default, actions set to hourly will
execute at the top of the hour and other actions will execute at midnight UTC.
It is also possible to select the time at which scheduled actions
will execute and sub-frequencies that execute multiple actions per frequency.
See Advanced Schedule Options below.
Sub-hourly actions are useful when you are protecting mostly
Kubernetes objects or small data sets. Care should be taken with more
general-purpose workloads because of the risk of stressing underlying
storage infrastructure or running into storage API rate
limits. Further, sub-frequencies will also interact with
retention (described below). For example, retaining 24 hourly
snapshots at 15-minute intervals would only retain 6 hours of
snapshots.
Backups performed via exports, by default, will be set up to export
every snapshot into a backup. However, it is also possible to select a
subset of snapshots for exports (e.g., only convert every daily
snapshot into a backup).
Note
To maintain backup recovery points, once the policy is saved
the export location profile can only be changed to a compatible location
profile. The UI will enforce compatibility when editing a policy,
but no compatibility enforcement is performed when editing the policy CR
directly.
A powerful scheduling feature in Veeam Kasten is the ability to use a GFS
retention scheme
for cost savings and compliance reasons. With this backup rotation
scheme, hourly snapshots and backups are rotated on an hourly basis
with one graduating to daily every day and so on. It is possible to
set the number of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly copies
that need to be retained and Veeam Kasten will take care of both
cleanup at every retention tier as well as graduation to the next
one. For on demand policies it is not possible to set a retention
schedule.
By default, backup retention schedules will be set to be the same as
snapshot retention schedules but these can be set to independent
schedules if needed. This allows users to create policies where a
limited number of snapshots are retained for fast recovery from
accidental outages while a larger number of backups will be stored for
long-term recovery needs. This separate retention schedule is also
valuable when limited number of snapshots are supported on the volume
but a larger backup retention count is needed for compliance reasons.
The retention schedule for a policy does not apply to snapshots and
backups produced by
manual policy runs. Any artifacts created by
a manual policy run will need to be manually cleaned up.
Restore points created by failed policy runs do not count
towards retiring older restore points and are retained until
there are enough newer restore points from successful policy
runs to satisfy the retention counts.
This situation can arise when policy runs are partially successful,
such as when a policy run successfully
backs up one app but fails on another or when export fails
after successfully creating a local restore point.
This outcome can lead to more restore points than expected,
as failed policy runs may create restore points until
the policy stops failing.
If desired, restore points from failed runs can be manually
deleted before reaching the point where there are sufficient new
successful policy runs to meet the retention counts.
Note
When restore points are retired, whether done manually or through a
policy retention schedule, Veeam Kasten takes care of cleaning up the
associated resources. The cleanup process is not immediate for all
resources; some are removed right away, while others, such as backup
data stored in an object store, may take a significant amount of time
to be completely removed. Data references shared between restore points,
aggregated data awaiting garbage collection, version retention for
immutable backups, and safety windows for re-referencing data are
among the reasons why retiring a restore point might not immediately
free up space in the underlying storage.
Additionally, due to data deduplication, some retirements may result
in minimal or no resource usage reclamation.
It is important to note that the increase in storage usage when creating
a restore point does not reflect the expected space reclamation once the
restore point is cleaned up.
By default, actions set to hourly will execute at the
top of the hour and other actions will execute at midnight UTC.
The AdvancedOptions settings enable picking how many times and when
actions are executed within the interval of the frequency. For example,
for a daily frequency, what hour or hours within each day and what minute
within each hour can be set.
The retention schedule for the policy can be customized to select which
snapshots and backups will graduate and be retained according to the longer
period retention counts.
By default, hourly retention counts apply to the hourly at the top of the hour,
daily retention counts apply to the action at midnight, weekly retention
counts refer to midnight Sunday, monthly retention counts refer to midnight on
the 1st of each month, and yearly retention counts refer to midnight on the
1st of January (all UTC).
When using sub-frequencies with multiple actions per period, all of the
actions are retained according to the retention count for that frequency.
The Advanced Options settings allows a user to display and enter times in
either local time or UTC. All times are converted to UTC and Veeam Kasten
policy schedules do not change for daylight savings time.
The BackupWindow settings allow a user to select a time interval
within which the policy will run. The policy is scheduled to run once
at the Backup Window start time. If the selected time interval is too
short, the policy run will not finish and will be canceled.
If the policy has an hourly frequency and the duration of the Backup
Window exceeds 1 hour, the policy is also scheduled to run every 60
minutes thereafter within the Backup Window.
AdvancedFrequencyOptions can be used with BackupWindow but
with some limitations. The Backup Window settings override time settings
(hours and minutes) selected in the Advanced Frequency Options. Advanced
Frequency Options are not available for Hourly and Daily frequencies and
only partially available for the other frequency options.
With staggering enabled, Veeam Kasten will automatically find an optimal
start time and run the policy within the selected interval. Staggering allows
Veeam Kasten the flexibility to stagger runs of multiple policies and
reduce the peak load on the overall system.
This section describes how policies can be bound to applications, how
namespaces can be excluded from policies, how policies can protect
cluster-scoped resources, and how exceptions can be handled.
The most straightforward way to apply a policy to an application is to
use its name (which is derived from the namespace name). Note that you
can select multiple application names in the same policy.
For policies that need to span similar applications, you can select
applications by an application name wildcard. Wildcard selection will
match all application that start with the wildcard specified.
For policies that need to span all applications, you can select
all applications with a * wildcard.
For policies that protect only cluster-scoped resources and do
not target any applications, you can select "None". For more
information about protecting cluster-scoped resources, see
Cluster-Scoped Resources.
For policies that need to span multiple applications (e.g., protect
all applications that use MongoDB or applications that have been
annotated with the gold label), you can select applications by
label. Any application (namespace) that has a matching label as
defined in the policy will be selected. Matching occurs on labels
applied to namespaces, deployments, and statefulsets.
If multiple labels are selected, a union (logical OR) will be
performed when deciding to which applications the policy will be
applied. All applications with at least one matching label
will be selected.
Note that label-based selection can be used to create forward-looking
policies as the policy will automatically apply to any future
application that has the matching label. For example, using the
heritage:Tiller (Helm v2) or heritage:Helm (Helm v3)
selector will apply the policy you are creating to any new
Helm-deployed applications as the Helm package manager
automatically adds that label to any Kubernetes workload it creates.
Even if a namespace is covered by a policy, it is possible to have the
namespace be ignored by the policy. You can add the
k10.kasten.io/ignorebackuppolicy annotation to the namespace(s)
you want to be ignored. Namespaces that are tagged with the
k10.kasten.io/ignorebackuppolicy annotation will be skipped during
scheduled backup operations.
Normally Veeam Kasten retries when errors occur and then fails the action
or policy run if errors persist. In some circumstances it is desirable
to treat errors as exceptions and continue the action if
possible.
Examples of when Veeam Kasten does this automatically include:
When a Snapshot policy selects multiple applications by label and
creates durable backups by exporting snapshots, Veeam Kasten treats
failures across applications independently.
If the snapshot for an application fails after all retries,
that application is not exported. If snapshots for some
applications succeed and snapshots for other applications fail,
the failures are reported as exceptions in the policy run. If
snapshots for all applications fail, the policy run fails and
the export is skipped.
If the export of a snapshot for an application fails after
retries, that application is not exported. If the export of
snapshots for some applications succeed and others fail, the
failures are reported as exceptions in the export action and
policy run. If no application is successfully exported, the
export action and policy run fail.
In some cases, treating errors as exceptions is optional:
Veeam Kasten normally waits for workloads (e.g., Deployments or
StatefulSets) to become ready before taking snapshots and fails
the action if a workload does not become ready after retries.
In some cases the desired path for a backup action or policy
might be to ignore such timeouts and to proceed to capture
whatever it can in a best-effort manner and store that as a
restore point.
When an exception occurs, the job will be completed with exception(s):
Details of the exceptions can be seen with job details:
Any exception(s) ignored when creating a restore point are noted in the
restore point:
This section describes how specific application resources can either be
included or excluded from capture or restoration.
Warning
Filters should be used with care. It is easy to
accidentally define a policy that might leave out essential
components of your application.
Resource filtering is supported for both backup and restore operations,
whether performed through policies or manual actions.
Separate resource filters can be specified for namespaced application
resources and cluster-scoped resources.
The recommended best practice is to create backup policies
that capture all resources to future-proof restores and to use filters
to limit what is restored.
In Veeam Kasten, filters describe which Kubernetes resources should be
included or excluded in the backup. Backup operations without filters
capture the default sets of API resources. Restore operations without
filters restore all artifacts from the restore point or cluster restore
point.
In an include filter,
an entry that specifies only resource names or labels
will match the resource types that are included by default.
In an exclude filter,
such entries apply to all resources selected
by the include filter or by default.
Resource types are identified by group, version, and resource type
names, or GVR
(e.g., networking.k8s.io/v1/networkpolicies).
Individual
resources are identified by their resource type and resource name, or
GVRN.
In a filter, an empty or omitted group, version, resource type
or resource name matches any value. For example, if you set Group:apps and Resource:deployments, it will capture all
Deployments no matter the API Version (e.g., v1 or
v1beta1).
Core Kubernetes types do not have a group name and are identified by
just a version and resource type name (e.g., v1/configmaps).
The sentinel value core can be used in the group field of a filter
to match the empty group and not all group values.
Filters reduce the resources in the backup by first selectively
including and then excluding resources:
If no include or exclude filters are specified, the default API
resources belonging to an application are included in the set of
resources to be backed up
If only include filters are specified, resources matching any GVRN
entry in the include filter are included in the set of resources to
be backed up
If only exclude filters are specified, resources matching any GVRN
entry in the exclude filter are excluded from the default set of resources
to be backed up
If both include and exclude filters are specified, the include
filters are applied first and then exclude filters will be applied
only on the GVRN resources selected by the include filter
For a full list of API resources in your cluster, run kubectlapi-resources.
Veeam Kasten also supports filtering resources by labels when taking a
backup. This is particularly useful when there are multiple apps running
in a single namespace. By leveraging label filters, it is possible to
selectively choose which application to backup.
Note
The snapshot creation process completes without generating
output artifacts if all the resources are deselected. Attempting
to export the snapshot fails with the error message "No artifacts
provided." For instance, if no resources are selected during
label-based filtering, the snapshot process will complete successfully
without generating any artifacts. However, the export process will fail.
Therefore, for a successful export, including at least one resource
is crucial when creating a snapshot.
The rules from the previous section describing the use of include and
exclude filters apply to label filters as well.
Multiple labels can be provided as part of the same filter if they are
intended to be applied together. Conversely, multiple filters, each with
their own label, can be provided together, signifying that any of the labels
should match.
This filter only includes resources with both app:mysql2 and app:mysql1 labels
This filter includes resources with either app:mysql2 or app:mysql1 label
A filter can specify both GVRN and labels. Such filters match resources
that satisfy both the GVRN and the specified labels.
Veeam Kasten implements useful defaults for resources included without
filters, along with the ability to override and extend those defaults.
There are different defaults for namespaced and cluster-scoped resources.
Note
Veeam Kasten considers a Kubernetes namespace similarly to a namespaced
object. By default, Veeam Kasten creates a namespace artifact as part of the
application backup, and the namespace artifact is stored in a restore point,
not a cluster restore point. Filters for application backup and restore can
include or exclude the namespace artifact. This differs from
namepace exclusion.
The default for backing up namespaced Kubernetes resources is to include:
In-tree Kubernetes resources relating to the deployment of applications.
For example, this includes, but is not limited to,
specs for namespaces,
workloads (deployments, statefulsets, standalone pods),
services,
configmaps, secrets, PVCs, serviceaccounts, and more.
This excludes dynamically-created and low-level resources relating to
the running of applications.
Resources such as endpoints, events, replicasets,
metrics, horizontalpodautoscalers, and volumesnapshots
are not included by default.
Specific OpenShift resource types: deploymentconfigs, buildconfigs,
imagestreams, imagestreamtags, routes, and templates.
Other custom resource types defined by installed
customresourcedefinitions.
The default for backing up cluster-scoped Kubernetes resources is to include:
storageclasses from group storage.k8s.io
customresourcedefinitions from group apiextensions.k8s.io
clusterroles from group rbac.authorization.k8s.io
clusterrolebindings from group rbac.authorization.k8s.io
Resource types that are not backed up by default can be included by adding them
to a GVRN entry in the include filter.
Once an include filter is specified, only resources that match a GVRN entry
in the include filter are included in the set of resources to be backed up.
To include additional resource types plus default resource types,
include a GVRN entry for
the defaults resource in the group actions.kio.kasten.io.
For safety, Veeam Kasten automatically includes
resources such as associated volumes (PVCs and PVs)
when a StatefulSet, Deployment, DeploymentConfig, Pod,
or Virtual Machine workload is included by filters. Such auto-included
resources can be omitted by specifying an exclude filter.
Operations teams can define multiple protection policy presets that specify
parameters such as schedule, retention, location and infrastructure. A catalog
of organizational policy presets and SLAs can be provided to the development
teams with an intimate knowledge of application requirements, without
disclosing credential and storage infrastructure implementation. This ensures
separations of concerns while scaling operations in a cloud-native environment.
To create a policy preset, navigate to the Presets page under the
Policies menu in the navigation sidebar. Then simply click
CreateNewPreset and, as shown below, the policy preset creation section
will be shown.
As can be seen, the workflow of the policy preset creation is quite similar to
the policy creation. The major difference here is that the policy preset does
not contain any application specific settings, which must be specified
directly in the policy.
While creating (or editing) a policy the user can opt in to "Use a Preset".
Users without list permissions on policy presets can manually enter the name
of the policy preset to use, if they have been given that information.
Note
Each policy created using a preset does not copy its configuration
but refers to it. This means that every preset change also entails a change
in the corresponding policies.
Once you have created a policy and have navigated back to the main
dashboard, you will see the selected applications quickly switch from
unmanaged to non-compliant (i.e., a policy covers the objects but no
action has been taken yet). They will switch to
compliant as snapshots and backups are run as scheduled or manually
and the application
enters a protected state. You can also scroll down on the page to see
the activity, how long each snapshot took, and the generated
artifacts. Your page will now look similar to this:
More detailed job information can be obtained by clicking on the
in-progress or completed jobs.
It is possible to manually create a policy run by going to the policy
page and clicking the runonce button on the desired policy. Note that
any artifacts created by this action will not be eligible for
automatic retirement and will need to be manually cleaned up.
It is possible to pause new runs of a policy by going to
the policy page and clicking the pause button on the desired policy.
Once a policy is resumed by clicking the resume button, the next policy
run will be at the next scheduled
time after the policy is resumed.
Paused policies do not generate skipped jobs and are ignored for the purposes
of compliance. Applications that are only protected by paused policies are
marked as unmanaged.
It is also possible to edit created policies by clicking the edit
button on the policies page.
Policies, a Kubernetes Custom Resource (CR), can also be edited
directly by manually modifying the CR's YAML through the dashboard or
command line.
Changes made to the policy (e.g., new labels added or resource
filtering applied) will take effect during the next scheduled policy
run.
Careful attention should be paid to changing a policy's retention
schedule as that action will automatically retire and delete restore
points that no longer fall under the new retention scheme.
Editing retention counts can change the number of restore points retained
at each tier during the next scheduled policy run. The retention
counts at the start of a policy run apply to all restore points created by the
policy, including those created when the policy had different retention counts.
Editing Advanced Schedule Options can change
when a policy runs in the future and which restore points created by future
policy runs will graduate and be retained by which retention tiers.
Restore points graduate to higher retention tiers according to the
retention schedule in effect when the restore point is created. This protects
previous restore points when the retention schedule changes.
For example, consider a policy that runs hourly at 20 minutes after the hour
and retains 1 hourly and 7 daily snapshots with the daily coming at 22:20.
At steady state that policy will have 7 or 8 restore points.
If that policy is edited to run at 30 minutes after the hour and retain the
23:30 snapshot as a daily, when the policy next runs at 23:30 it will
retain the newly created snapshot as both an hourly and a daily. The 6 most
recent snapshots created at 22:20 will be retained, and the oldest snapshot
from 22:20 will be retired.
Note
When editing the export location profile on a policy,
the updated location profile should only be changed to a profile that
references the same file or object store as the previous location
profile. Failing to do so will result in the previously exported backups
being inaccessible by Veeam Kasten.
Care should be taken when disabling backup/exports from a policy. If
no independent export retention schedule existed, no new exports will
be created and the prior exports will be retired as before. The
exported artifacts will be retired in the future at the same time as
the snapshot artifacts from each policy run.
If an independent retention schedule existed for export, editing the
policy to remove exports will remove the independent export retention
counts from the policy. Upon the next successful policy run, the
snapshot retirement schedule will determine which previous artifacts
to retain and which to retire based upon the policy’s retention
table. Retiring a policy run will retire both snapshot and export
artifacts. Either snapshot or export artifacts for a retiring policy
run may already have been retired if the prior export retention values
were higher or lower than the policy retention values.
You can easily delete a policy from the policies page or using the
API. However, in the interests of safety, deleting a policy will not
delete all the restore points that were generated by it. Restore points
from deleted policies can be manually deleted from the Application restore
point view or via the API.
You can upgrade an eligible policy either through the policies page or
by using the UpgradeAction API. When you upgrade a Policy,
it automatically upgrades all associated StorageRepositories.
Additionally, with the periodic release of new Veeam Kasten versions,
you can expect enhancements to improve backup robustness and performance.
Upgrading policies not only facilitates the implementation of these
enhancements but also prepares the ground for Veeam Kasten to introduce new
data management features or operations.
Depending on the specific Veeam Kasten release and the amount of data
protected through a policy, an upgrade workflow may take anywhere from
a few minutes to several hours to complete. Users are advised to plan
downtime when scheduling upgrades. Upgrading a policy requires exclusive
access to the underlying backup data and metadata. Currently, Veeam
Kasten requires that no import or export actions be performed on a
given policy while an upgrade is in progress. If a user attempts to upgrade
an export policy while the policy is running or its restore points
are being imported elsewhere, that operation will be interrupted.
During a policy upgrade, imports and exports of restore points
created by the same policy will be put on hold
until the upgrade is complete.
Warning
In the event that a policy or repository upgrade
is interrupted or fails unpredictably
(for example, due to a network failure),
the user should wait until all pending actions against
the policy have completed. Afterward, the user may retry
the upgrade. If the upgrade continues to fail unpredictably,
please contact Kasten support.
