Hi everyone!  In previous posts I’ve talked about enabling the Kasten Multi-Clustter Manager.   In this post, I’ll talk about how to use this Multi-Cluster Manager to create Global Location Profiles.

Remember in Kasten, Local Profiles are used as Repositories to keep the backups of Kubernetes applications.

With Multi-Cluster Manager, location profiles can be created at a global level in the primary cluster and then distributed to the clusters in Multi-Cluster configuration.   It’s important to highlight that creating Global Location Profiles is quite similar to creating location profiles in a single Veeam Kasten deployment.

Once a Global Location Profile is created, then you can distribute it to the clusters in Multi-Cluster configuration, as we will describe next.

 

Creating Global Location Profiles

  • In the Kasten Multi-Cluster Dashboard, click in Global Profiles in the left menu.

  • Click in Location in the left menu, and then click in Create New Profile

  • In the Name and Provider step of the wizard, provide the following:
    • Location Profile Name
    • Then select one of the supported Storage Providers.  In this case I’ve selected Google Cloud Storage.
    • Then click in Next.

  • In the Configuration step, provide the following (please be aware that the configuration and required data is different for every Storage Provider):
    • Provide the ID of the Google Cloud Project.
    • Provide the GCP Service Key related to a Service Account with proper permissions to access the Google Cloud Storage.  You can use JSON or PKCS12 format.
    • Provide a location for the Bucket you are adding as Location Profile.
    • And finally provide the name of the Google Cloud Storage bucket.
    • As an option, and if the bucket meets the requirements, it is possible to enable immutable backups for this Location Profile.
    • Click Next

  • In the Summary step, check all the data is right, and then you just click in Submit to complete the Location Profile creation.

  • You can see now the Location Profile has been created, and the current Validation status is “Indeterminated”.    Please be aware that Global Location Profiles are not validated or used until they are distributed to at least one cluster.

 

Creating a Distribution

Once the Global Location Profile is created, the next step is creating a Distribution to enable this Location Profile in one or more Kasten instances.   Distributions provide a way to describe the relationship between globally defined resources (in this case the Global Location Profile) and the clusters to which they should be distributed. This offers a tremendous amount of flexibility, allowing the correct policies to be applied to the correct clusters.

  • In the Kasten Multi-Cluster Dashboard, click in Distributions in the left menu.  Then click in Create New Distribution.

  • Provide the following information:
    • A name for the distribution
    • Then select the clusters where you want the Global Location Profile be available.  The Distribution will make sure all these clusters can use the Global Location Profiles selected in this Distribution.
    • Then select the resources, in this case the Global Location Profile, that you want to distribute to the clusters selected in the previous step.

  • Click in Add Distribution
  • Now you can see the Distribution has been created, and the status is Syncing.

  • After few seconds you can see the status now has changed to Synced.

  • Now, you can go to one of the clusters, in this example I go to k10-hol-primary cluster, and you can check the Location Profiles available.   As you can see in the following image, now this cluster has 2 Location Profiles, one created localy, and  the Global Location Profile distributed from the Multi-Cluster Manager

NOTE: For simple setups, a single distribution may be sufficient. Multiple distributions may be used to accommodate more complex setups and topologies.

 

As you can see, a very simple process, that can help you to manage and operate Kasten more efficiently.