Protecting OpenStack with Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments

Content

The rapid adoption of OpenStack by both public cloud vendors and private cloud IT providers has created a demand for enterprise-class data protection for cloud computing. This paper examines the features in IBM Tivoli Storage Manager that ensure data protection in these new cloud computing environments.

Tivoli Storage Manager provides data protection, archive, and disaster recovery solutions for dedicated client/server applications based on shared hosts or “bare-metal” environments. Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments provides agentless data protection of virtual machine guests (or instances). In addition, open source code contributions by IBM to the OpenStack Foundation allows backup and restore operations of block storage volumes directly to Tivoli Storage Manager.

The Protecting OpenStack with Tivoli Storage Manager.pdf   paper shares our experience with our own in-house OpenStack cloud configured with a VMware compute node. The paper examines the configuration requirements and notes any limitations and workarounds necessary to ensure protection of OpenStack.

The objectives of this paper are:

• Establish a reference environment for OpenStack and Tivoli Storage Manager testing. We also note specific configuration choices of OpenStack, VMware, and Tivoli Storage Manager necessary to ensure successful data protection.
• Document different approaches for data protection of OpenStack tenants:
  • Document the procedure for VM backups and restore operations of OpenStack instances running in VMware compute nodes.
  • Document the procedure to backup and restore of OpenStack block storage volumes.
• Document the procedure for back up and restore of OpenStack servers.