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Avoid the protection gap – VBR has your back

Picture this: You just migrated your first virtual machine (VM) from VMware vSphere to your Red Hat OpenShift cluster. You check the OpenShift console. The VM is live and happily serving production workloads. Looks perfect. Nothing seems wrong.

But wait. Is it actually protected? What about the backup job?

You check it and… oops. It still points at vSphere. Not good. You can’t have OpenShift VMs exposed like that. Thankfully, Veeam Backup & Replication steps in to close this gap.

New Platform, New Mindset

Red Hat OpenShift has quickly become the leading landing zone for organizations who are modernizing their virtualization estates and it’s easy to see why. You get a future-proof, Kubernetes-native platform that runs VMs and containers side by side, with a cost-efficient model to match. The Broadcom acquisition of VMware and the licensing restructuring that followed only accelerated this shift, turning a steady modernization trend into an industry-wide re-evaluation.

Companies are now moving their entire VM estates off vSphere. Given the scale and complexity of these endeavors, it’s important to keep in mind that such a cutover can last between 12 and 18 months. During this transition period, both of these worlds will need to coexist in parallel, with some VMs still running on vSphere while the rest begin to run on OpenShift. Managing both platforms at once can be challenging and requires rethinking your approach. For a good discussion on this topic, please access this Veeam on-demand webinar.

vSphere versus OpenShift is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Your migration destination, OpenShift, is a modern application platform that leverages KubeVirt to let VMs run on Kubernetes. This new model offers great flexibility and scalability but introduces the complexity of Kubernetes, which could pose a challenge if you’re more familiar with the traditional approach to managing VMs. Without the right protection measures in place, this learning curve adds delay and risk to your replatforming journey.

In addition, traditional backup solutions weren’t built to handle this paradigm shift. They can integrate with vSphere APIs, but are clueless about OpenShift, KubeVirt, and Kubernetes. Those VMs that you just migrated are invisible to your tooling, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Veeam combines decades of data protection expertise with industry leadership in Kubernetes so the VMs you migrate never fall out of coverage.

Hope is Not a Strategy

A migration protection gap is not only a compliance oversight, but a serious operational risk during your most turbulent period too. It can put your whole company’s business continuity in danger. Outages don’t wait for a convenient time. They hit when they hit, and suddenly you’re in for a sleepless night or a weekend spent fixing production downtime. The vulnerability window between “Hey! I just migrated the VM to OpenShift” and “Oh, dang! I should probably also back it up now” is when incidents often happen.

Manual snapshots are not sufficient protection. They share the same storage and failure domain as the VMs themselves, and without immutability, retention, or verification, they can’t stand in for a real backup. Going without safeguards entirely is even less acceptable for production or customer-facing workloads. You don’t want to end up in the news, and you can’t afford to lose your employees’, partners’, and customers’ data because of a missing backup job. Most importantly, you can’t afford to lose their trust.

Protected from Day One

The good news is that Veeam has a solution for this. We’re launching native Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine protection that’s built directly into Veeam Backup & Replication v13.1+.

Veeam Backup & Replication can detect, monitor, and protect your OpenShift VMs. There’s no new product to learn, no new license to acquire, and no new contract to sign. Just upgrade Veeam Backup & Replication to v13.1+ and install the Veeam KubeVirt Plug-in as you would any other Veeam Backup & Replication plug-in. Then deploy a lightweight in-cluster Veeam KubeVirt Proxy via a Helm chart and connect it to the plug-in. That’s it; your OpenShift VMs are now covered just as they were before the migration.

Veeam Backup & Replication automatically discovers your freshly moved VMs, and your existing policy framework applies to your new OpenShift cluster from day one.

Nothing New on Your Plate

Replatforming is not an easy task; we know that. That’s why we don’t want to add anything more to your plate. Veeam takes the friction out of the process, making the whole transition easier for you.

You use the same Veeam Backup & Replication console your team already knows. Then you can extend the existing service level agreements (SLAs), recovery time objectives (RTOs), recovery point objectives (RPOs), policies, retention schedules, deduplication, and immutability settings to OpenShift. You can keep using the same repositories as you did before, since all of them are supported.

You also get full and incremental backups plus offsite replication and archive to tape for flexible long-term retention. This includes file-level recovery for granular restores, immutable storage on hardened repositories, and encrypted backup files for strict security requirements.

The feature list goes on, and we have ambitious plans to keep adding to it, but the absolute killer is cross-hypervisor mobility. You can take any Veeam Backup & Replication-protected VM, back it up, and restore it onto OpenShift, or, if you wish, do the reverse by restoring an OpenShift VM onto any other supported hypervisor. This is great for disaster recovery (DR), rolling back a failed cutover, or even the vSphere to OpenShift migration itself. Cross-hypervisor mobility is what we are most proud of, so do us a favor: Test it out, use it for your VMs, and thank us later.

Veeam Backup & Replication takes the complexity away from you. You use only one console to safeguard both vSphere and OpenShift VMs at the same time throughout the transition. There’s no new tool to learn and no new habits to develop.

If you have regulatory requirements for retaining backups, such as e-discovery, financial records, or audit, Veeam lets you maintain your existing backup chains and stay compliant while you modernize to OpenShift.

Two Tools, Two Jobs

“But wait! What about Veeam Kasten? It already supports KubeVirt VMs, right?” Good point! You are correct. Both Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Kasten can protect your OpenShift VMs. This is intentional; we want to give you options.

Veeam Backup & Replication represents the traditional approach to VM protection by abstracting away underlying Kubernetes-related complexity and offering a UI backup console that admins already know and love. Veeam Kasten can also handle KubeVirt VMs, as those run on Kubernetes. Its main focus is on protecting containerized apps: Think Helm-deployed workloads, pods, and microservices for folks who want to dive deeper into the orchestration layer.

Different tools for different needs and different teams. As a rule of thumb, if you have VMs, go for Veeam Backup & Replication. If you have containers, go for Veeam Kasten, and if you have both, go for both. The choice comes down to workflow, not necessity: Either product can protect your OpenShift VMs. Pick the console your team lives in and add the other only if you want to go deeper on the opposite layer. Both solutions complement each other and can coexist in the same Red Hat OpenShift cluster to offer you a full spectrum of protection for your production workloads.

Take Care of Your VMs

After reading this blog you should already be as hyped to try it out as we are to release it. Upgrade Veeam Backup & Replication to v13.1, install the plug-in, deploy the proxy, connect to your OpenShift cluster, and make sure your VMs are protected and recoverable. Nothing more to it. No new tools. No coverage gap. No extra licenses.

Veeam Backup & Replication is here to make sure your migration goes smoothly and your OpenShift VMs have the backup and recoverability they deserve. Take care of your VMs, and they will take care of you.

Start with Veeam Backup & Replication-native Red Hat OpenShift protection by reaching out to your Veeam account team to schedule a proof of concept today!

See how Veeam protects OpenShift Virtualization workloads in a two-minute interactive walkthrough.

The post No Backup Gap: Introducing Veeam Backup & Replication-Native OpenShift Protection appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.

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