Uniview Vault
Uniview Vault is a lightweight, sustainable workload mobility and backup solution built directly onto native OpenStack services.Because it integrates natively with upstream OpenStack services—utilizing Nova quiescing, Cinder snapshots, volume backups, and Swift storage—it eliminates the need for proxies, data movers, or API modifications. It is frequently used to migrate VMs between isolated environments within a cluster when no storage is shared. Additionally, Uniview Vault serves as a highly effective tool for disaster recovery, standard backups, and rolling workloads back to previous states. Uniview doesn't re-engineer the wheel, instead it leverages as much as possible the best of OpenStack own capacity. As over powerful user console API foundation and cluster foundtion moving data for backup purpose is best faciliated, so that it appears to be more concise, natural and lightweighted to OpenStack to compare with many re-purposed or standalone backup softwares. Many standalone backup systems, due to like Data Mover, Proxies, and separate user console, they work but often are not optimal and high complex, then led to big operation overhead and less ideal user experiences. One vision of Uniview vault has been to fill in the ecosystem gap for reliable backup solution to make it like commodity that user can access in way of low-cost, consistent, maintenance free, easy to use and frictionless.
Prerequistes of backend OpenStack installations
Uniview Vault leverages core services of OpenStack itself only, and doesn't require excessively others. Those services ideally include Ceph, Ceph RGW, Cinder volume and Cinder backup, Images services, or Swift Cluster etc
Ceph RBD and Ceph RGW Backup and restore by Uniview Vault works most efficiently when the storage backend is Ceph. But it works with LVM, iSCSI backend too. When backend by CEPH, the overhead of incremental backup by RBD DIFF is minimal with metadata comparing, and the data moving is all on server side and within storage network. Heavy backup at enterprise grade when Uniview Vault works with Ceph, generally has no technical bottleneck. Archiecturally it's optimal and has no overhead.
Cinder Backup Driver Uniview integrates seamlessly with all Cinder backup drivers. The sole caveat is for backup‑in‑motion, where user‑driven data transfers demand a multi‑tenant storage backend. To enable this capability, deployments must use the Swift backup driver (cinder.backup.drivers.swift.SwiftBackupDriver). On-demand customization will be provided, when backup-in-motion is desired, when other like GCS, NFS storage at backend, on different data replication or account shared.
Scaling up Uniview Vault is scalable. Architecturally Uniview Vault is service side data handling and doesn't have local heavy computing and is more focused on orchestrating. However Uniview Vault is full user panel and good amount of CPU/RAM is still highly recommanded. For large deploy, it's recommended to add more Uniview node (both uniview core and uniview schedulers are stateless, and running multiple is safe by design to handle large user base). On backend of OpenStack, for large deploy at High Available setup, it's highly recommended to run cinder-bacup on each controller node. Cinder-backup daemon is stateless, and just adding more daemons to pick up request from queue is by its design too, and a proven best practice.
Manual backup creation
more details come soon!.
Schedule and Cron based backup up
more details come soon!.
Freezing VM for Application Consistent backup
Uniview Vault does provide the capabilties to take application consistent backups by utilizing the Qemu-Guest-Agent.
The Qemu-Guest-Agent needs to be installed inside the VM. The installation process depends on the Guest Operating System.
RPM-based Guests
yum install qemu-guest-agent
systemctl start qemu-guest-agent
Deb-based Guests:
apt-get install qemu-guest-agent
systenctk start qemu-guest-agent
Windows Guests require the installation of the VirtIO drivers and tools. The Qemu-Guest-Agent is calling the fsfreeze-hook.sh script either with the freeze or the thaw argument depending on the current operation. The fsfreeze-hook.sh script is a normal shell script. It is typically used to do all necessary steps to get an application into a consistent state for the freeze or to undo all freeze operations upon the thaw. Location of the fsfreeze-hook.sh at linux env is: /etc/qemu/fsfreeze-hook. It's user own responsibility to compose such freeze scripts for what client application should be frozen for an application consistent backup taking. After qemu-guest agent install, one more setting of instance metadata is needed. The meta is a signal for Nova and Uniview Vault to detect its freezing applicability
Metadata expected:
os_require_quiesce: yes
Values of yes or true both are accepted by Uniview Vault
Instance migration between OpenStack
Backup in motion is often used as a migration tool for replicating one instance from env a, to env b, when they don't need to share anything. The instance replication by Uniview Vault is instant, and fully automated. Thanks to its performance, quick responding and full instance state replicating, it is a proven disaster recovering technique too for geographical workload backup etc.
Uniview Vault have most of this facilitated, and only requirements is the container name used for particular VM backup at source OpenStack, should be present at the target OpenStack swift container too. Uniview Console is generally intuitiave for conducting such migration.
Restore VM from backup
more details come soon!.