Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance 5.12.0.1 Kubernetes User Guide

Log locations for Kubernetes asset backup and restore operations and pod networking

All session logs for Kubernetes asset protection operations are pulled into the /logs/external-components/k8s folder on the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance host.

PVC parallel backup and restore performance considerations

To throttle system performance, PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance supports only five parallel namespace backups and two parallel namespace restores per Kubernetes cluster. PVCs within a namespace are backed up and restored sequentially.

You can queue up to 100 namespace backups across protection policies in PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance.

Overhead of PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance components on Kubernetes cluster

At any time during backup, the typical footprint of PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance components (Velero, PowerProtect Controller, cProxy) is less than 2 GB RAM Memory and four CPU cores, and such usage is not sustained and visible only during the backup window.

The following resource limits are defined on the PowerProtect PODs, which are part of the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance stack:

• Velero maximum resource usage: 1 CPU core, 256 MiB memory
• PowerProtect Controller maximum resource usage: 1 CPU core, 256 MiB memory
• PowerProtect cProxy pods (maximum of 5 per cluster): Each cProxy pod typically consumes less than 300 MB memory and less than 0.8 CPU cores. These pods are created and terminated within the backup job.

Only Persistent Volumes with VolumeMode Filesystem supported

Backup and recovery of Kubernetes cluster assets in PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance is only supported for Persistent Volumes with the VolumeMode Filesystem.

Objects using PVC scaled down before starting the restore

The following activities occur before a PVC restore to the original namespace or an existing namespace when PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance detects that the PVC is in use by a Pod, Deployment, StatefulSet, DaemonSet, ReplicaSet, or Replication Controller:

• PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance scales down any objects using the PVC.
• PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance deletes the daemonSet and any Pods using PVCs.

Upon completion of the PVC restore, any objects that were scaled down are scaled back up, and any objects that were deleted are re-created. Ensure that you shut down any Kubernetes jobs that actively use the PVC before running a restore.

Restore to a different namespace that already exists can result in mismatch between UID of pod and UID persistent volume files

A PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance restore of files in persistent volumes restores the UID and GID along with the contents. When performing a restore to a different namespace that already exists, and the pod consuming the persistent volume is running with restricted Security Context Constraints (SCC) on OpenShift, the UID assigned to the pod upon restore might not match the UID of the files in the persistent volumes. This UID mismatch might result in a pod startup failure.

For namespaces with pods running with restricted SCC, it is recommended to use one of the following restore options:

• Restore to a new namespace where PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance restores the namespace resource as well.
• Restore to the original namespace if this namespace still exists.