It’s no secret that the current virtualization industry is undergoing a sea change. With recent large acquisitions, elevating licensing costs, deteriorating product support, and the demand for hybrid and multi-cloud support, interoperability, and flexibility, many organizations are looking to re-platform away from legacy virtualization platforms and adopt a more flexible cloud native approach. At the same time, organizations need to ensure they have backup, disaster recovery, and ransomware protection for these next generation environments.
And while Kubernetes has supported Virtual Machine workloads since the introduction of the opensource KubeVirt project in 2016, the ramp to adoption has traditionally been a long one. Deployed from opensource constituent parts, platform engineers would have to source physical servers, install and configure the nodes and create a Kubernetes cluster, install the KubeVirt Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) into the cluster, deploy and configure persistent storage, and deploy and configure a network controller or service mesh. Then couple in the need to lifecycle manage all of these components, with minimal downtime while ensuring interoperability, and it quickly becomes almost a non-starter for enterprise.
SUSE aims to simplify the deployment and management of KubeVirt by introducing its opinionated, opensource HCI offering of SUSE Virtualization (previously known as SUSE Harvester), where underlying Kubernetes (leveraging SUSE RKE2), KubeVirt, distributed storage (leveraging SUSE Longhorn), and network can be deployed from a simple installation ISO. This allows administrators and organizations to deploy a modern virtualization stack in a matter of minutes rather than days or weeks And with rapid innovation, SUSE has been continuously adding enterprise-grade features and capabilities to SUSE Virtualization, make it a top contender for organizations looking to modernize their virtualization approach. When managed by Rancher Manager, SUSE customers can manage both VM and container workloads from a single interface.
With the release of Veeam Kasten 7.5, we are proud to extend industry-leading, Kubernetes native resilience to SUSE Virtualization, unifying VM and container management and data protection. Customers can now backup, restore, and move VM workloads on SUSE Virtualization along with their containerized workloads on Rancher with ease, helping to elevate SUSE Virtualization as a robust, enterprise-ready virtualization solution.
We have integrated support capabilities directly into the Kasten product, simplifying the deployment and configuration of Kasten on SUSE Virtualization clusters. Customers do not need to create transforms to restore SUSE Virtualization workloads, or have to manually annotate longhorn storage classes to allow for block mode export of VM disks.
As illustrated above, Veeam Kasten is deployed on the SUSE Virtualization cluster itself, leveraging the underlying RKE2 cluster and longhorn storage with the Kasten web interface exposed via the built-in nginx ingress class. Kasten is able to capture the Virtual Machine metadata (e.g. virt-launcher, virtualmachine, secrets, etc) from the cluster and export to Object or Blob storage, just as it does for any containerized workload. In the event of ransomware attack or accidental deletion, VMs can be restored to the original cluster. And with Kasten multicluster manager, multiple SUSE Virtualization clusters can be protected via a single interface.
To see for yourself, try the interactive demo below, or watch a video demo on how you can deploy, protect, and restore SUSE Virtualization VMs using Veeam Kasten 7.5.